thesis statement on freedom and security

Individual Freedoms and National Security Essay

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Individual freedoms and national security are sometimes seen as two opposites. However, in ideal, national security should reflect the balanced relationship between the two mentioned concepts. Moreover, the principle of the prevalence of individual freedoms over the national security underlies the democratic idea. Individual freedoms include individual rights and are protected by the US Constitution (Longley). This paper argues that individual freedoms should never be sacrificed in the name of national security.

This essay proposes that the protection of individual freedoms by maintaining national security is a fundamental principle and goal of democracy. US President Joe Biden notes, “I strongly believe that democracy is the key to freedom, prosperity, peace, and dignity” (Biden 3). Unlike authoritarian or totalitarian systems, a democratic system puts individual freedoms ahead of national security interests. The implementation of this principle always raises controversy, since there is no single rule universal for all cases. However, individual freedoms are protected in most areas of social life, including migration, cyber security, economic stability, and international diplomatic relations. Interestingly, actual cyber security policy and practice take both human-centric and national-security-centric approaches (Deibert 411). In this regard, the states develop “indivisible network security on a planetary scale for the widest possible coverage of the human experience” (Deibert 412). The above example indicates the breadth of possibilities for applying the principle.

There is probably a counter-argument against the opinion that national security interests should take precedence over individual freedoms. This position can be justified by an external threat or military ambitions and is usually applied by authoritarian regimes. This position is wrong since national security should protect the interest of every citizen, not the abstract idea of the nation. Every citizen is part of the nation and their freedoms should be sacred.

Thus, it was discussed, how individual freedoms should never be sacrificed in the name of national security. The necessity to sacrifice individual freedoms is usually promoted by authoritarian regimes whose real purpose is to meet the interests of the regime. On the contrary, in democratic states, individual freedoms are fundamental and cannot be violated under any circumstances. These freedoms are sacred and ensure the integrity of the democratic states.

Works Cited

Biden Jr, Joseph R. Interim national security strategic guidance . EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT WASHINGTON DC, 2021.

Deibert, Ronald J. “Toward a human-centric approach to cybersecurity.” Ethics & International Affairs 32.4 (2018): 411-424. Web.

Longley, Robert. “What Are Individual Rights? Definition and Examples.” ThoughtCo , 2021. Web.

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Home > ETDS > Dissertations and Theses > 5816

Dissertations and Theses

Freedom vs. security: analyzing the connection between states' prioritization of security over civil liberties and citizen support for democratic norms.

Carlyn Trumbull Madden , Portland State University Follow

Hatfield School of Government. Department of Political Science

First Advisor

Melody Valdini

Term of Graduation

Summer 2021

Date of Publication

Document type, degree name.

Master of Science (M.S.) in Political Science

Political Science

Civil rights -- New Zealand -- Public opinion, Civil rights -- Turkey -- Public opinion, Civil rights -- United States -- Public opinion, National security, Democracy

10.15760/etd.7687

Physical Description

1 online resource (vi, 136 pages)

Is global democracy declining? This is a question many have argued over, leading to multiple, oftentimes contradictory, answers regarding causes and potential solutions. This thesis seeks to explore the question of democratic decline by analyzing changes over time in public opinion survey data in three states- New Zealand, Turkey, and the United States- looking specifically at how the government has balanced the tradeoff between security and civil liberties in the post-9/11 world. I argue that long-term government prioritization of security over freedoms has eroded support for fundamental democratic norms, as citizens willingly accept restrictions to their rights in exchange for a sense of security, causing gradual democratic decline. The evidence from an analysis of survey data over the past ten years supports this theory, with New Zealand emerging as a best-case scenario that always prioritized freedom, and remains a strong democracy, Turkey as a worst-case scenario that strongly supported security over all else and quickly transitioned away from the fledgling democracy they were into full autocracy, and the US gradually, and worryingly, slipping deeper into hybridity with enduring restrictions on civil rights. Further, the gap between citizen perceptions of the abstract and reality of democracy appears to be growing, resulting in a general inability (or unwillingness) among citizens to see an increase in security policy as counter to democracy, in either an abstract or practical sense, despite evidence that expanding security is balanced out by a decrease in freedoms. While not the only factor leading to democratic decline, government prioritization of security policy over civil liberties has long term consequences for democratic survival and serious implications for the future.

© 2021 Carlyn Trumbull Madden

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Madden, Carlyn Trumbull, "Freedom vs. Security: Analyzing the Connection between States' Prioritization of Security over Civil Liberties and Citizen Support for Democratic Norms" (2021). Dissertations and Theses. Paper 5816. https://doi.org/10.15760/etd.7687

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

The security versus freedom dilemma. an empirical study of the spanish case.

• 1 Sociology Department, University of Malaga, Málaga, Spain
• 2 Sociology Department, University of Almeria, CEMyRI, Almería, Spain

One of the classic debates in public opinion, now more prevalent due to the COVID-19 pandemic, has been the dilemma between freedom and security. Following a theoretical review, this article sets out to establish the sociodemographic profiles and those variables that can correlate and/or explain the inclination towards one or the other, that is, the dependent variable “freedom-security,” such as victimization or the assessment of surveillance. The analysis is based on the results of a survey prepared by the Center for Sociological Research (CIS, in Spanish) and administered to a sample of 5,920 Spaniards. The conclusions indicate that the majority inclination is for security, especially among older men, with elementary education attainment level and right-wing ideology. Furthermore, although victimization correlated with the dependent variable, the perception of being a possible victim led to a preference for safety rather than the actual experience of having been a victim. Finally, the positive assessment of surveillance through technologies such as video cameras explains or is strongly associated with security, making it a promising line of research for future work and a means to improve the understanding of the analyzed dilemma.

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic is not the first event that has forced public opinion to consider the dilemma of freedom versus security in a world dominated by the influence of so-called new information and communication technologies. Currently, technological control is provoking debates around the right to privacy in the context of the surveillance society ( Lyon, 2018 ; Lyon and Wood, 2021 ).

There are precedents to the influence of information and communication technologies, the extent to which they can control or influence citizens and countries, and their effect on these actors when valuing one side over the other when balancing freedom versus security. By way of example, the following cases affected both the personal safety of private citizens and nation-states: the case of “Wikileaks” in 2006; the “Snowden” case in 2013; “Cambridge Analytica” case in 2014, the spying of Jeff Bezos by Saudi Arabia in 2019, or the most recent “Pegasus case” which was made public in 2021.

Currently, the incidence of the pandemic has had a more significant impact on control over citizens and a corresponding lower degree of freedom. An example of this is the research carried out by the Canadian Citizen Lab into internet censorship, wherein it analyzed how the Chinese authorities, through WeChat, used an artificial intelligence system capable of detecting the semantic meaning of texts. From 1 January to 15 February 2020, up to 516 keyword combinations were set to trigger censorship, automatically locking the server, and preventing further communication ( Ruan et al., 2020 ). According to “The COVID-19 Civic Freedom Tracker” database, developed by “The International Center for Not-for-Profit Law” ( www.icnl.org ), most of the restrictions applied by States as a result of the pandemic are: an increase in powers related to surveillance of citizens; suspension of rights; control over information and delay of political elections. The Spanish case is even more severe regarding freedom of information and the press, given that the Spanish government commissioned a government body, the Sociological Research Center, to include in its February Barometer the possibility of limiting all information on the pandemic in official sources ( González-Requena, 2020 ).

Given these antecedents, this research aims to analyze the dilemma based on the opinions, attitudes, and behaviors of Spaniards with regards to freedom and security. This is a continued and constant dilemma in the field of sociology and social sciences, starting from the analyzes on the change from materialist to postmaterialist values worldwide as stated by Inglehart ( Inglehart, 1990 ; Inglehart, 2018a ), and particularized for the case of Spain by Díez Nicolás (2011) , Díez Nicolás (2020) . The working hypothesis established by Inglehart (1977) , widely verified in countless investigations, was that those societies and individuals when reaching higher levels of personal security, including a lower level of crime, and a higher level of economic security, tend to be oriented toward more libertarian or self-expressive values.

This trend, however, is not valid for all the countries, as shown by the different waves of the World Values Survey. In the case of Spain, there has been a decrease in the post-materialism index compared to the waves of 1990 and 2005, further verified by the most recent wave of 2014 ( Díez Nicolás, 2020 ). This empirical inclination can be ascribed to factors that have changed the perception of citizens towards feeling greater personal insecurity, such as, among others, the irruption of jihadist terrorism, the increase in organized crime and crime in general, the greater flexibility of the labor market and job insecurity, the uncertainty about the future pension model, the increase in crime and insecurity related to the internet and social networks, the real estate market, or lately, the current global viral pandemic.

For this reason, we believe that, in the Spanish case, depending on their perception of security, citizens will choose a greater or lesser degree of freedom. In this regard, we believe that security takes precedence over a greater or lesser degree of freedom. In other words, security is, to a greater extent, is the dominant value over freedom. More specifically, and as a working hypothesis, we believe that historical, economic, geographical, or sociological influences and the perception that the majority of Spaniards have towards citizen insecurity determine that security be valued more highly than freedom. In this instance, citizen insecurity refers to crime and other types of insecurity such as economic, employment, health, or informational.

This study traces the most significant theories about security versus freedom. It presents an empirical investigation for the Spanish case, based on the 2016 CIS General Social Survey, where a descriptive analysis will be carried out based on the more significant sociodemographic and socioeconomic variables. Secondly, multiple regression models will carry out an explanatory analysis to discover if Spaniards prefer security over freedom using crime and victimology as a dependent variable in terms of perception, opinion, attitude, and experience.

Freedom Versus Security

In a globalized world, the interrelation and connectivity of countries, economies, and citizens are constant. In this order of things, it is observed that the private sphere is ever decreasing, resulting in a smaller margin of freedom, either for individuals or collectives, whereby citizens, in general, cannot control their information themselves, and the privacy of their information is constantly threatened. There is a general perception about the vertiginous social changes, hence the data mentioned above from the World Values Survey on the orientation of the most developed countries in recent waves towards more materialistic, scarcity, or survival values instead of values related to postmaterialism, self-expression, or emancipation ( Inglehart, 2018b ).

Our research does not focus on the classic six or twelve items of materialist/postmaterialist values but rather on the debate between, on the one hand, freedom and accessibility to surveillance information and, on the other hand, security related to surveillance linked to citizen security, such as personal security against crime and victimology. The research question for the Spanish case is: Do Spaniards, in general, perceive a greater degree of citizen insecurity and thus accept lower degrees of freedom in return? or simply stated; Do Spaniards demand higher levels of security measures because they feel insecure?

It is not easy to define the concept of freedom in philosophical terms, as it is a polyhedral and contradictory word. However, the type of freedom at stake is easier to define since it affects the collective. Two examples of freedom from the territorial and evaluative perspectives are the differing visions of American and European liberalism ( Leonard, 2011 ) or Bauman’s consumerist interpretation of capitalist liberalism ( Bauman, 1989 ). Similarly, differences of perspective could be included from the academic stance of authors such as Bay (1958) , Sen (2001) , Skinner (2012) , Honneth (2015) .

The term freedom is contradictory and difficult to apply to specific realities and is even more complicated when combined with the term security. In this sense, the questions posed are: what freedom? Freedom for whom? How much freedom? Freedom for what purpose? Inversely, the questions posed could be: what security? Security for whom? or how much security? Or even, security for what purpose?

Suppose we place ourselves in the classic dilemma, positive versus negative freedom ( Berlin, 2002 ; Rothbard, 2015 ) or, more recently, quantitative versus qualitative freedom ( Dierksmeier, 2019 ). In that case, it is observed that the object of freedom passes from the individual/property dyad to an individual triad/own good/other people’s good.

In this instance, we understand freedom as being able to carry out any individual or collective initiative, without any limitations or coercion, whether by the State or other individuals, and with budgets and objectives that reinforce both one’s own good and that of others. With this definition in mind, we believe that we can answer the questions previously formulated.

The concept of security has a similar or even greater number of facets as that of freedom. The most classic issue is that there are different types of security, national or state security, which ensures the protection of State, and human security, which ensures the protection of individuals ( Mack, 2005 ; Krause and Williams, 2016 ). Logically, to the two types of security mentioned above, the supranational system that is increasingly important in the globalized world should also be added. Similarly, these supranational entities, together with nation-states, would also become subjects responsible for security. To these entities, we could also add other new actors such as NGOs or public opinion.

References to national or state security or supranational security are logically interrelated. The denomination of collective security seems more logical. In December 2004, the High-level Panel of the United Nations Secretary-General on Threats, Challenges, and Change presented a report entitled: “A more secure world: our shared responsibility.” The report highlights six groups of threats to collective security: conflicts between states; violence within the state (civil wars, human rights abuses, and genocide); poverty; infectious diseases; environmental degradation; nuclear, radiological, chemical, and biological weapons; terrorism; and transnational organized crime ( Morillas, 2007 ). The UN Secretary-General, K. Annan, also pointed to the March 2005 document entitled: “In larger freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All,” highlighting in point IV, “Freedom from Fear,” that most of the victims of these new conflicts are civilians.

The above notwithstanding, the discussion remains constant, whether in reference to state security or human security. With regards to the former, many believe that the State is predominant in matters related to security as it is the institution which must ensure it. Although individual citizens remain a definitive reference in this matter, it is the State that provides the necessary framework for the security of all. In the latter case, although human security is essentially focused on protecting individuals, there are two variants: the focus on “freedom from wants” and the “freedom from fear.” In the first, human security is based on basic human needs, or more specifically, on threats to well-being in the spheres of human rights, religion, poverty, hunger, disease, epidemics, the environment, wars, education, and information. In the second, human security revolves around the elimination of all types of coercion, threat, and violence in the daily lives of individuals ( Suhrke, 1999 ; Seiple and Hoover, 2004 ; Knox Thames et al., 2009 ; Seiple et al., 2015 ).

Bauman’s sociological theory of liquid modernity and the nature of community extends the debate. Individuality increases freedom but does so at the expense of security and a sense of community. The concepts of “freedom versus security” and “individuality versus community” are simultaneously complementary and contradictory. Increasing either freedom or security comes at the expense of the other. The conflict between “security and freedom” and between “community and individuality” may never be resolved, but as they are equally indispensable values, we continue to search for a solution ( Bauman, 2000 , Bauman, 2001 ). In this sense, achieving a balance between freedom and security is probably impossible. The problem, however, is that when security is lacking, free agents are deprived of the trust without which freedom can hardly be exercised. When, on the contrary, it is freedom that is lacking, security feels like slavery or a prison ( Bauman, 2005 ).

In methodological terms, in this research, we will consider information through the new information and communication technologies, which would essentially fit into the field of human security, both with regards to “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear.” Therefore, we understand security to be the central value that encompasses both the structure of human needs and its limitations due to coercion and threats in the daily lives of individuals.

These definitions align with United Nations Development Programme (1994) and more specifically with the idea that freedom also includes security. However, in operational terms, we believe that, among others, fear, insecurity, coercion of religious freedom, hunger, crime, epidemics can constrain citizens, essentially because the survival instinct is more fundamental than freedom. As Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations, states in his report entitled: “In larger freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All” of 21 March 2005, in point 14 of the document: “The notion of larger freedom also encapsulates the idea that development, security, and human rights go hand in hand” ( Annan, 2005 ). Grim and Finke (2012) , in an empirical investigation in 200 countries, observed that when governments and various social groups restrict religious freedom, the possibilities of violent persecution, conflicts, instability, and terrorism increase.

Materials and Methods

This work is based on the descriptive analysis of a survey administered in Spain at the start of 2016 in which the behavior of the dependent variable “freedom or security” is analyzed.

The survey research was carried out by the Sociological Research Center (CIS) on a representative sample of adult Spaniards (see Table 1 ). The sample selection is based on a vast network of sampling points by municipality and a multi-staged sample selection system, culminating in face-to-face interviews. The sampling error was ±1.4% for the whole of the corresponding sample. All the methodological information of the survey, such as the technical sheet, questionnaire, data matrix, and descriptive results, are available for download in the corresponding link (see Table 1 ).

TABLE 1 . Factsheet of the survey.

The instrument or questionnaire presents the study variable (“freedom-security”) in the following literal way: “On a scale of 0–10, in which 0 means having full access to information even if it meant losing security, and 10 means having maximum security even if it meant losing access to information. Where would you position yourself? [0 = Maximum access to information even if it meant losing security (Freedom); 10 = Maximum security even if it meant losing access to information (Security)].” The question or dependent variable used includes an attitude, a certain predisposition, or a simple opinion rather than values. The latter, according to Rokeach (1973) are important life goals or standards which serve as guiding principles in a person’s life, while attitudes are learned predisposition to respond in a consistently favorable or unfavorable manner with respect to a given object ( Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975 ).

The independent variables used include, on the one hand, traditional classificatory sociodemographic variables such as gender, age, marital status, subjective social class, ideology, education, size of locality, income, national identity, and religion. On the other, a set of questions related to security such as victimization, having been a victim of a crime, reporting a crime, having engaged in delinquent behavior in youth, and the perception of potentially being a victim of a crime ( Herranz and Fernández-Prados, 2019 ); and other questions related to freedom of information or privacy such as internet use and assessing the presence of video cameras in public spaces.

The data analysis includes a descriptive, correlational, and explanatory methodology of the dependent variable being studied and is presented in three sections of the results. The descriptive analysis aims to draw a profile according to the sociodemographic variables and other “freedom-security” dilemma issues. The correlational analysis shows the relationships between those variables of a continuous nature with the study variables and their orientation (either towards greater security or towards greater freedom). Finally, a table with two multiple regression models is presented in the explanatory analysis, one with all the outstanding independent variables and the other with only those deemed to be significant.

Descriptive and Profile

Table 2 presents the relationship between sociodemographic and socioeconomic variables and their frequency or percentage according to the sample of their values or alternative responses in some grouped cases. Thus, the survey sample is composed mainly of women (51.5%) who are over 60 years old (28.4%), married (55.6%), middle subjective social class (70.4%) with centrist ideology (33.9%), describing the most representative social characteristics of the Spanish population.

TABLE 2 . Descriptive and sociodemographic profiles.

Table 2 also contains the descriptive analysis, mean and standard deviation, of the dependent variable “freedom-security” for each of the sociodemographic and socioeconomic characteristic values of the sample. For the sample as a whole, the mean of the “freedom-security” variable is 6.4 on a scale of 0–10 with a standard deviation of 2.36. In essence, this means that Spanish population leans towards “security.” The profile where security tends to stand out corresponds to that of men (M = 6.6; SD = 2.28); over 60 years old (M = 6.9; SD = 2.29); widowed, divorced or separated (M = 6.7; SD = 2.44); low subjective social class (M = 6.5; SD = 2.38); with right-wing ideology (M = 6.8; SD = 2.3); elementary education (M = 7.0; SD = 2.22); rural locality (M = 6.5; SD = 2.34); low income (M = 6.7; SD = 2.34); identified as a Spanish national (M = 6.5; SD = 2.30) and practicing Catholic (M = 6.8; SD = 2.19).

Table 3 also shows the description of the variables related to safety or victimization and freedom or privacy that appear in the questionnaire. Thus, half the respondents said they had been the victim of a crime (50.7%), a third had reported a crime (33.6%), two-fifths had engaged in delinquent or quasi-criminal behavior in adolescence (22%), and a 10th considered they were likely to be the victim of a crime (9.4%). Likewise, the vast majority considered surveillance cameras in public spaces to be very good (37.7%) or good (46.6%), and finally, almost three-quarters used the internet (72.3%), and almost half the respondents used social networks (48.2%).

TABLE 3 . Descriptive and sociodemographic profiles.

As in the previous table, the means and standard deviations for each variable are presented with the values of the independent variables that lean towards either security or freedom are highlighted. Thus, the profile of those surveyed with higher means and, therefore, lean more towards security are those who had never been victim of a crime (M = 6.6; SD = 2.29); never reported a crime (M = 6.5; SD = 2.34); nor engaged in pre-delinquent behaviors in adolescence (M = 6.5; SD = 2.29); although they did consider that they were likely to be a victim of a crime (M = 6.7; SD = 2.36); strongly agreed with surveillance cameras (M = 6.8; SD = 2.26) and did not use the internet (M = 7.1; SD = 2.17).

Correlation Among Continuous Variables

The results of the correlation matrix between the dependent variable, “freedom-security,” and the continuous sociodemographic variables and those related to victimization and privacy are shown in Table 4 . Only the variable “nationalism” does not correlate with the study variable, and all the others reach a significance of p value < 0.001 except for size of locality and religious practice with a p value < 0.01. Although it should be borne in mind that the n of the sample is high and can cause this significant correlation with most of the variables, we can point to certain co-variations between the dependent variable and the remainder. That is, a desire for greater levels of security is related to older age, lower social class, more right-wing ideology, lower educational attainment and living in smaller localities, and greater religious observance. In addition, the demand for greater security shows a lower correlation with having been the victim of a crime, reporting a crime, and having pre-criminal or delinquent behaviors, or manifesting stronger agreement with surveillance cameras and lower use of social networks.

TABLE 4 . Correlation between Freedom-Security and continuous variables.

Explanatory and Regression Analysis

Finally, Table 5 shows the results of two multiple regression models where, on the one hand, all the variables used in the descriptive variables and the correlation are contemplated (with the insignificant variable of nationalism); and, on the other hand, only those variables that in the last step had proven to be significant in this multivariate technique. Thus, the first model is comprised of 15 variables attaining a low R squared (R 2 = 0.068), and only five variables are significant within the model. The second model presents only those five significant variables in the final step. These reinforce the level of significance; they all reach p value < 0.001 and increase the R squared (R 2 = 0.080). These variables confirm a first approximation to a more detailed explanatory profile or predictive variables that lean towards security, male gender, older age, right-wing ideology, low educational level, and supporting surveillance cameras in public spaces.

TABLE 5 . Regression analysis multiple (Dependent variable = Freedom-Security).

Discussion and Conclusion

The principal hypothesis of the present study was that the majority trend of the population would lean towards security rather than freedom. This has been confirmed by the results in the case of Spain. In the seventh and last wave of the World Values Survey (2017–2021), which is still being developed, similar results are found for the set of 54 countries for which data was available, where 69.7% of the more than eighty thousand interviewees answered that security is more important than freedom. Only in three countries does freedom have a majority percentage: the United States, New Zealand, and Australia ( Haerpfer et al., 2020 ). In this sense, comparisons with other international studies that include similar questions related to the freedom vs security debate such as the European Social Survey, International Social Survey Program ( Fernández-Prados et al., 2019 ), as well as sociodemographic profiles and other social characteristics or explanatory factors could be helpful to confirm or expand this hypothesis and trend.

The study conducted is not able to give a definitive answer about future trends in the population’s preferences between freedom and security. Among other reasons, the research is Cross-sectional and not longitudinal, moreover, it is limited to an only country to the influence of a global context. Certainly, it would be necessary to conduct or analyse cross-sectional and international studies. The recent analysis of the World Values Survey shows a return to the values of loyalty, security primacy, distrust, and authoritarian populisms as a reaction to the values of tolerance and individual freedom ( Norris and Inglehart, 2019 ). In short, culture seems to be facing the freedom-security dilemma as a historical pendulum, although our current context is priming security.

The relationship and correlation found in this article between victimization and the “freedom-security” debates provide at least two nuances. Firstly, against what is expected, people who are victims of crimes, whistle-blowers, and those who had delinquent or pre-criminal behaviours in adolescence lean more towards freedom than security, while those who are perceived as priority targets of crimes overwhelmingly opt for the security. That is, the issue of security has is related to personal experiences or behaviours, thus connecting them to the theory of securitization and de-securitization by Butler (2020) , which states that the major security issues such as terrorism, climate change, gender violence, or any conflict are constructed and deconstructed in political discourses and public opinion. In this sense, the inclusion of more variables related to the perception of insecurity in future studies could also be helpful to build more significant explanatory models with a stronger association.

In addition to the sociodemographic variables in which the association with security rather than freedom have been verified (male gender, older age, and lower level of education attainment), ideology has behaved as a highly predictive variable, associating the right more towards security. In contrast, the left was associated more closely with freedom. Azmanova (2020) points to a redefinition of the ideological panorama and the left-right axis as a consequence of the impact of globalization in Western societies, with a winning party that considers it an opportunity and a losing party that perceives it as a risk. The winners and supporters of globalization value its advantages for a more cosmopolitan lifestyle and open economy, placing themselves in traditionally left-wing positions. The losers of globalization represent blue-collar workers, those who fear or are insecure about opening international markets and migration, defending positions of a certain economic patriotism, materialistic values, and ideological positions located to the right and extreme right ( Azmanova, 2020 ).

Perhaps another fitting interpretation of the trend towards security comes from the interpretation of the consumer society, and by extension the network society, in the context of Bauman’s sociological theory. In liquid modernity, consumer society replaces groups with an increasing number of “swarms” and the comfort of flying in a swarm derives from having security in numbers. The individual is based on the idea that when many have chosen to fly in the same direction, it must be a good and safe choice. In a “swarm” there is no exchange, cooperation or complementarity; there is only physical proximity and basic coordination in a given direction. Swarms have no leaders and no hierarchy of authority. They gather, disperse and reassemble from one event to the next, drawn by shifting and moving targets. The actual leadership of the swarm may “assign” leadership roles to particular members for a short period of time before they return to anonymity within the “swarm” ( Bauman, 2007 ).

The role of new technologies requires a reflection that Manuel Castells (1996) pointed out in the last century when he differentiated between the mere information society and the informational society. In other words, information and communication technologies have been the basis for entering a new informational era after the industrial society. This radical social and cultural change situates the debate on the dilemma between freedom and security precisely in the development and trends of technologies. Thus, the great historical and current challenge, according to Clarise Véliz (2020) , is to recover individual and collective privacy (freedom) in the face of the data economy (security) in the hands of the power of large technology companies and governments. The fact of shifting the debate from a mere technological issue to the realm of power relations makes the freedom-security dilemma an exciting ideological and philosophical topic.

The theses and the consequences of the surveillance society proposed by David Lyon have been reflected in the solid and significant association between the assessment of the presence of cameras in public spaces and the “freedom-security” debate. The results have confirmed that the preference for security is supported by those who defend the presence of public social control tools such as surveillance cameras. The current crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has sparked the debate on “freedom-security” and the new mechanisms of social control such as mobile phones and tracking and surveillance applications used by States and technology companies ( Taylor et al., 2020 ). In this way, the virtual space acquires an increasing relevance to address the redefined dilemma as privacy-cybersecurity.

Finally, the current crisis caused by the global pandemic points to an emphasis on security and new social challenges to be faced at global, national, and individual levels ( Varin, 2022 ). At the global level, it has increased tensions between the superpowers of China and the United States and demonstrated the unwillingness of rich countries to help much poorer countries when the health of their own populations is at risk. For countries, in some cases it has increased their tendency to fragment, and in others it has led to authoritarian rule that may well outlast the pandemic. And at the individual level, it has led to unprecedented forms of intervention, accentuating the growth of the “surveillance state” and “quarantining” rights and freedoms. In this context in which the pandemic and the measures adopted have led to greater confrontation, polarization and socio-political control, the debate between security and freedom takes on greater interest and connotations of a political and ideological nature from the point of view of public perception and opinion ( Fernández-Prados et al., 2021 ). In this way, the new context of the global pandemic crisis, the dilemma between freedom and security, and public opinion become a triad that will undoubtedly generate future lines of research.

Data Availability Statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/Supplementary Material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Author Contributions

GH contributed to conception and design of the study. JF organized the database and performed the statistical analysis. GH and JF wrote the first draft of the manuscript and all authors contributed to manuscript revision, read, and approved the submitted version.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors, and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Keywords: security, freedom, victimization, ideology, surveillance

Citation: Herranz de Rafael G and Fernández-Prados JS (2022) The Security Versus Freedom Dilemma. An Empirical Study of the Spanish Case. Front. Sociol. 7:774485. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2022.774485

Received: 12 September 2021; Accepted: 17 January 2022; Published: 08 February 2022.

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Copyright © 2022 Herranz de Rafael and Fernández-Prados. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Juan S. Fernández-Prados, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Let’s talk about security and freedom

• By discoversociety
• September 05, 2017
• 2017 , Articles , DS48

Barry Knight

We live by the stories we tell ourselves. The most important storyline is how to live a good life, since this determines what we believe in, how we act, and the institutions we build. The key text here is the famous 1977 essay by Berger and Neuhaus , which examines the importance of mediating structures such as family, church, workplace, trade union and community association in connecting individuals to society. In a healthy society, these connections are at the heart of the common public good.

In the period following the Second World War such mediating structures formed the bedrock for organising British society. This, combined with government policies that pursued full employment and a welfare state, led to social advance on a scale never seen before. This was planned during the wartime Conservative-led coalition government and implemented in full by the Labour government after 1945. The leitmotif was “security”. Politicians of all stripes were determined to avoid the return of the dark days of the 1930s depression.

In the 1970s, this story failed. The post-war consensus between parties buckled under the weight of “stagflation” – the coincidence of low economic growth, high unemployment and high inflation. This resulted in industrial disorder and social unrest, from which a strong leader emerged with a new story. Following her election victory in 1979, Margaret Thatcher was determined to raise the status of business, money-making and growth by creating an “enterprise culture”. The new philosophy was based on five principles: free markets, small state, low tax, individual liberty and big defence.

The watchword for this approach was ‘freedom’. The importance of security was downplayed, since this had produced a ‘dependency culture’. Moreover, Thatcher believed that expenditure on the welfare state was wasteful because it undermined economic growth. While many people criticized the social dimensions of this approach, the economic consequences were remarkable, and median household income has more than doubled in real terms in the 40 years since 1977.

To achieve such growth, society shifted from an economy based on production to one based on consumption. Zygmunt Bauman has described this as moving from ‘solid modernity’ to ‘liquid modernity’. (1) While in the past we saw ourselves as ‘pilgrims’ in search of deeper meaning in a stable world, we now see ourselves as “tourists” in search of multiple but fleeting social experiences. As a result, we now find it harder to construct a durable sense of ourselves as we tend to live a fast life in a kaleidoscope of relationships.

This has created a crisis of meaning. While mediating institutions have declined, shopping has filled the void. As Neal Lawson puts it in All consuming , “Shopping has been emotionally, culturally and socially grafted onto us.” (2) He also says that for many it is an addiction that fails to satisfy us: “Turbo-consumerism is the heroin of human happiness.” An extreme form of such consumerism can be found in ‘celebrity culture’ in which famous individuals transform their fame into product brands, which the public then consumes. In emulating celebrities, ordinary people use the ‘selfie’, posting their photos on social media to display the illusion that life is ‘all about me’. Such developments were foreseen 50 years ago by Guy Debord in his 1967 Society of the spectacle in which “authentic social life has been replaced with its representation.” (3) Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as “the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing”. This condition is the “historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life”.

The price is a soul sickness at the heart of our society, which breeds deep insecurity and unhappiness for many, while violating the basis in nature on which our species depends. The Webb Memorial Trust reviewed the evidence on social attitudes, housing, work, finances, and health, and concluded that the UK is a deeply insecure society. Such insecurity permeates society and is not restricted to the one-fifth of the population who experience chronic poverty.

So, while pursuit of the word ‘freedom’ may have led to much progress, it has come at the expense of “security”. Looking back at history, it appears that security and freedom are antinomies. In their book, The Fourth Revolution Micklethwait and Wooldridge trace the history of government over the past 500 years and find that one or other of these two concepts has been central to the story of societies during different periods. (4) In the 17 th century, security rose to the fore influenced by the work of Thomas Hobbes, but by the 19 th century liberty got the upper hand through the influence of John Stuart Mill. In the mid 20 th century, security became paramount though the influence of Beatrice Webb, only to be replaced by freedom from the 1970s onwards under the influence of Milton Friedman.

We see this dynamic in the organization of contemporary politics, in which the dominance of two political parties encourages bifurcation, one stressing freedom and the other security. And yet, this framing has failed us as a society – the pursuit of one at the expense of the other leads to distortions when what we need is balance. Our current trajectory, based on freedom, encourages untrammelled economic growth, even though Carbon Tracker warns that the destruction of our ecosystem is just around the corner. At the same, there is no obvious alternative because the framing of the current narrative on security takes us back to yesterday’s world of the welfare state for which there is little capacity, finance or public support.

So how do we make progress? The two camps are increasingly polarised, and communication between them seems to occur through shouting. Ponder for a moment the extraordinary fact that, despite all the problems that Greece faces, a Greek foundation – the Stavros Niarchos Foundation – has committed $150 million to Johns Hopkins University to lead a worldwide effort to restore open and inclusive discourse to rescue our democracies.

So how can we make progress? The first helpful step would be to admit our confusion. As Yanis Varoufakis puts it: “Nothing humanizes us like aporia – that state of intense puzzlement in which we find ourselves when our certainties fall to pieces… and when the aporia casts its net far and wide to ensnare the whole of humanity, we know we are at a very special moment in history.” (5)

Such a perspective takes us back to basics, forcing us to rethink our values and to decide what kind of society we want. We attempted to do this in Rethinking poverty: What makes a good society . We used many techniques – surveys, focus groups and participative research to find out what kind of society people want.

Our results show that people want security and freedom. Rather than being antinomies, people see them as complementary. People’s views are complicated and nuanced, and cannot easily be captured in opinion polls that yield binary answers. While our results are provisional, detailed analysis of the results suggests that there are five core principles in what people want from their society:

• We all have a decent basic standard of living
• So, we are secure and free to choose how to lead our lives
• Developing our potential and flourishing materially and emotionally
• Participating, contributing and treating all with care and respect
• And building a fair and sustainable future for the next generations

One underlying concept that links these five principles is the idea of ‘community’. This reflects the fact that, if there is one factor above all others that people value most, it is the quality of the relationships they have. This is the source of people’s sense of security and freedom.

The conclusions of Rethinking poverty: What makes a good society set out the implications of the findings for the methods of developing a society we want. The conclusions are that a completely different approach is needed, and we cannot rely on politics to do this for us. A good society is one that we create, it cannot be something done to us. As Terry Pratchett wrote in Witches Abroad , “You can’t go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it’s just a cage”. Nowhere is this truer than in relation to the ending of poverty, a process that now can and must involve the poor as their own agents of change

Notes: (1) Bauman, Z. (2013) Liquid modernity , New York: John Wiley and Sons. (2) Lawson, N. (2009) All consuming , London: Penguin. (3) Debord, G. (1994) The society of the spectacle , New York: Zone Books. (4) Micklethwait, J. and Wooldridge, A. (2015) The fourth revolution: The global race to reinvent the state , London: Penguin. (5) Varoufakis, Y. (2011) The global minotaur, University of Chicago Press Economics Books

Barry Knight is a social scientist and statistician, and Director of the Webb Memorial Trust . Having advised the Ford Foundation and the CS Mott Foundation, he now works with the Global Fund for Community Foundations, the Arab Reform Initiative and the European Foundation Centre.   He is co-chair of the Working Group on Philanthropy for Social Justice and Peace and is the author or editor of 14 books on poverty, civil society, community development and democracy.

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The value conflict between freedom and security: Explaining the variation of COVID-19 policies in democracies and autocracies

Nicole j. saam.

1 Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany

Carmen Friedrich

2 Department of Sociology, University of Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany

Henriette Engelhardt

3 The State Institute for Family Research (ifb), Bamberg, Germany

Associated Data

The data underlying the results presented in the study are available from the World Values Survey (WVS) research program ( https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp ) and from the Oxford Covid-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) project ( https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/research-projects/covid-19-government-response-tracker ). The authors confirm that the data is third-party data and that they had no special access privileges other researchers would not have. The data files can be downloaded without restrictions.

In the name of health security, individual freedoms were constrained in an unprecedented way in many countries, democratic or authoritarian, all over the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet the constraints have not been consistent across countries, which motivates this paper to examine the relevance of value preferences towards freedom or security in the society for COVID-19 policies. Based on data for 40 democratic and authoritarian countries, the analyses show that the variation in the stringency of COVID-19 policies can be explained by value preferences of the population only in autocracies. In democracies, however, we do not find such a relationship. Governments in democratic political systems, we argue, are responsive to their constitutions and face prosecution by the judiciary if they violate the law or provisions of the constitution, limiting their capacity to implement strong COVID-19 policies. Nevertheless, their COVID-19 policies restricted citizens’ freedoms and liberties, which means that these policies were rather not responsive to citizens’ preferences for freedom, democratic rights and liberties. By highlighting how autocracies respond to their citizens’ value preferences for security, this paper contributes to a better understanding of how autocracies might gain legitimacy in times of crises.

1 Introduction

In the name of health security, individual freedoms were constrained in an unprecedented way in many countries, democratic or authoritarian, all over the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nation-wide lockdowns have become standard policies in fighting the spread of COVID-19. Yet the constraints have not been consistent across countries, which have motivated researchers to explain variations across jurisdictions [ 1 – 3 ]. Studies on policies in democracies find that the constitutional protection of individual liberties had a negative effect on restrictions of freedoms [ 4 ]. Studies involving democracies and autocracies offer a mixed picture: Some find that democracies were slower in adapting COVID-19 policies [ 5 , 6 ], while others find that democracy is not significant in predicting the speed of government stringency [ 7 ]. Frey et al. [ 8 ] show that autocracies have been stricter in their mobility restriction and contact tracing policies. Lins et al. [ 9 ], however, find no differences in social distancing policies between autocracies and democracies, and the level of democracy was not associated with the number of tests for COVID-19 [ 10 ]. Two studies include the overall freedom of the country: Toshkov et al. [ 3 ] find that a higher Freedom House global freedom score was related to a slower policy reaction in European countries, while Gutkowski [ 11 ] find that there was no relationship between lockdown timing and the degree of freedom in a sample of 128 countries. Toshkov et al. [ 3 ] conclude that “countries with higher freedom might have also been more reluctant to restrict the personal liberties and freedoms of citizens.” We do not find, however, an inclusion of the value conflict between (health) security and (individual) freedoms in statistical models that analyze the variation of COVID-19 policies across democracies or autocracies. This value conflict is extensively discussed in legal studies (e.g., for Germany, see [ 12 , 13 ]), political philosophy (e.g., [ 14 , 15 ]), political psychology (e.g., [ 16 , 17 ]), and economic history (e.g., [ 18 ]). From all these perspectives, this value conflict is considered to be relevant in times of pandemic. In Bilgen’s words, the question is “how a democratic order can overcome the security crisis while preserving its fundamental principles, such as individual freedom as a highest value” [13, p. 371]. Then, concepts (“securitas libertatis” [ 13 ]) and principles (“SAFE principles” [ 16 ]) are developed to guide preservation of supremacy, preponderance or primacy of one of both values or to restore the balance between freedom and security. Delanty [ 14 ] argues, that philosophical theories, such as utilitarianism and libertarianism, and ideas from philosophers such as Kant, Foucault, Agamben and Zizek, as well as nudge theory have shaped COVID-19 policies and draw attention to the problem of liberty or biopolitical securitization. He concludes that “the Coronavirus is more than a pathogen that threatens the lives of many people, but democracy is also in danger from the recent experiments with emergency government. … populations … have been disciplined in the late Foucauldian sense of the term to desire safety over liberty” [14, p. 14f.]. Vasilopoulos et al. [ 17 ] reveal the emotional mechanisms that lead citizens to decide to sacrifice their civil liberties in the light of threatened health security. We therefore claim that value preferences for freedom and security should be considered in explanations of variations of COVID-19 policies across jurisdictions. We find this value conflict also in the society, e.g., people were discussing the pros and cons in this value conflict in the social media. Political decision makers respond to value preferences in the society [ 19 – 21 ], we argue, however in different degrees. Since policy choices cannot simultaneously incorporate the totality of societal values, they are necessarily the selective result of competitive processes, favoring certain values over others, and excluding some values from the discourse altogether [ 20 ]. Distinguishing democracies and authoritarian regimes, our analyses show based on data for 40 countries that the variation in the stringency of COVID-19 policies in autocracies can be explained by value preferences of the population in this value conflict between freedom and security. In democracies, however, we do not find such a relationship. Governments in democratic political systems, we argue, are responsive to their constitutions and face prosecution by the judiciary if they violate the law or provisions of the constitution, limiting their capacity to implement strong COVID-19 policies. Nevertheless, their COVID-19 policies restricted citizens’ freedoms and liberties, which means that these policies were rather not responsive to citizens’ general preferences for freedom, democratic rights and liberties. By highlighting how autocracies respond to their citizens’ value preferences for security, this paper contributes to a better understanding of how autocracies might gain legitimacy in times of crises. Our study therefore provides quantitative support for the hypothesis that the Corona crisis will possibly strengthen autocratic regimes and weaken democratic political systems as the democracies fail to satisfy citizens’ demands for freedom while the autocracies respond to citizen’s demand for security.

The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 elaborates on the theories and previous findings that aim to explain variations in state COVID-19 responses–the relevance of values in politics, the differences found for democracies and authoritarian regimes, the relevance of policy diffusion as well as economic and health factors. In section 3, we explain material and methods. In section 4, we present our results. There are no substantial differences in the average stringency of COVID-19 policies over time between democracies and autocracies. Only the random effects models estimated for autocracies show a negative, significant association between value preferences of the population and the stringency of COVID-19 policies. In the conclusion, we argue that the Corona crisis provides an opportunity for autocracies to respond to value preferences of the population in a value conflict and thereby might gain legitimacy in times of crises.

2 Theories and previous findings

Values and politics.

Engler et al. [4, p. 2] as well as many others who research into the COVID-19 policies argue that governments are confronted with the “dilemma of weighing public health goals against democratic norms, rights and freedoms” resp. handling the trade-off between public health responses and democratic principles. We argue that this dilemma reflects a classical value conflict–the conflict between security and freedom, here between health security [ 22 ] and individual freedoms. In the context of the Corona crisis, health security and individual freedoms can be considered to be political values, not just individual values. Political values are correlated with attitudes towards policy goals [ 23 – 25 ], preferences for political parties [ 26 ], and electoral behavior [ 27 – 29 ]. We therefore argue that for political elites, it is rational to consider the value preferences in the society when adopting measures that, during normal times, either contradict fundamental democratic principles, such as freedom of movement or freedom of assembly, or are extraordinary anyway, e.g., the so-called “social distancing”. Toshkov et al. [ 3 ] distinguish two theoretical perspectives: (1) Party-political ideologies are related to the commitment to particular social values. COVID-19 policies are earlier or later based on these commitments. In particular, parties emphasizing traditional, authoritarian and nationalist values in their ideology, adopt faster and more restrictive COVID-19 policies. (2) Societal values and the overall freedom of the country influence COVID-19 policies. In more free societies, there is an appreciation of personal and collective liberties and freedoms–they are “protected by civil society” [3, p. 10] which imposes higher thresholds for governments to justify and enforce restrictions on fundamental freedoms. It is this latter theoretical perspective, which we investigate in this study, but we look at it from two sides and consider two societal values–freedom and security. We look at the trade-off between (health) security and (individual) freedoms considering not just the single values [ 30 ] but the value conflict. Stewart [ 20 ] delineates six forms of managing value conflict used by political and bureaucratic executives: structural separation, hybridization, casuistry, incrementalism, bias, and cycling.

Authoritarian versus democratic systems

We claim that democracies and authoritarian regimes respond differently to this societal value conflict. In democracies, politicians should hesitate to limit individual liberties because they are inherent to democracy [ 31 ], and because negative public perceptions of restrictions of personal freedoms may jeopardize their reelection [ 32 ]. Differences in COVID-19 policies between authoritarian and democratic political systems were found by several empirical studies. In particular, democracies were slower in adapting the new policies [ 5 , 6 ] or could possibly have been so [ 33 ]. The stronger the democratic institutions, the slower has the reaction in OECD countries been [ 2 ]. Autocracies have been more strict in their mobility restriction and contact tracing policies [ 8 ]. In democracies, the constitutional protection of individual liberties had a negative effect on restrictions of freedoms [ 4 ]. In democracies, political elites know that they are accountable [ 34 – 36 ]. Once the pandemic is over, or even before, other political as well as societal actors may question the legitimacy and proportionality of the COVID-19 policies and hold decision-makers accountable for their decisions. E.g., Maor & Howlett [1, p. 236] quote Israeli Minister of Finance Moshe Kahlon who argued that “surely there will be a national committee of inquiry, and no one wants [to have] to explain why there are Israeli corpses”. Such as Engler et al. [ 4 ], we argue that the strength of democratic institutions influences how political decision-makers in democracies handle the trade-off between health security and individual freedoms. The willingness to constrain civil liberties decreases with the degree to which democratic norms, rights and freedoms are protected and respected in non-pandemic times or times without a major crisis. The legal framework of democracies (rule of law; [ 37 , 38 ]), and here we go beyond Engler et al. [ 4 ], establishes a point of reference for decision-makers which outweighs the value preferences in the society. Created as a safeguard against the misuse of power by governments [ 39 ], strong democratic institutions also establish an impediment or check to rely and respond directly to moods, attitudes or value preferences in the society [ 40 , 41 ].

Policy diffusion

In the name of health security, not only individual freedoms were constrained in an unprecedented way in many countries. Also, other measures implemented were very similar, although with some variation, hinting to politics of policy diffusion. Note that some measures, such as the closure of schools, are laid out in national pandemic plans, while others are not, e.g., the closure of borders, which means that the enforcement of the former cannot easily be interpreted as an indicator of policy diffusion. Policy diffusion has been defined as a process where policies in one political unit influence the politics of other units [ 42 ]. Already Meyer and Rowan [ 43 ] have argued that policies can spread because policy makers aim to conform to dominant international norms, in the Corona crisis to the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO), while considering also domestic constraints which results in a legislation that locally adapts policies to serve a domestic constituency. Four mechanisms are proposed to explain policy diffusion: learning, competition, coercion and emulation. Gilardi & Wasserfallen [ 42 ] derive a dominant stylized model of policy diffusion from the relevant literature in international relations and studies in federalism and argue that this model is based on the assumption that decisions are the result of fact-based assessments. They claim that instead policy diffusion should more be seen as a political process. E.g., diffusion may also involve unsuccessful policies, may be based on ideologically biased learning, may be shaped at the issue-definition stage or based on empirically false assumptions. In this framework, policy diffusion during the Corona crisis can considered to be based on the mechanism of emulation. Emulation scholars emphasize the social construction of appropriate policies [ 44 ], and that international organizations, such as the WHO, not only construct the norms fostering the appropriateness of policies but also promote policy diffusion [ 45 , 46 ]. Such policies may be considered as legitimate [ 47 ]. However, in many cases, it is quite difficult to distinguish learning or coercion from emulation. E.g., in the Corona crisis, countries may also learn from mistakes of neighbouring countries’ COVID-19 policies; or announcements of the WHO together with announced financial support by other international or transnational organizations rather coerce some poorer countries to implement the proposed policies. Recently, Blatter et al. [ 48 ] have presented an alternative typology of policy diffusion, based on four motivational mechanisms (called interest-, rights-, ideology-, and recognition-driven policy diffusion) in an effort to overcome inconsistent operationalizations in empirical diffusion studies shown by Maggetti & Gilardi [ 49 ]. However, this typology is not yet suited to study diffusion processes in autocracies. In their empirical study on the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic Rausis & Hoffmeyer‐Zlotnik [ 50 ] found tentative evidence for processes of policy diffusion in the field of mobility restrictions in Europe (EU, EFTA and UK). Engler et al. [ 4 ] and Sebhatu et al. [ 2 ] found diffusion effects for COVID-19 policies in European democracies and OECD countries, respectively.

Economic and health factors

While diffusion effects may be present, we expect that the stringency of COVID-19 policies adopted by governments generally follow the epidemiological situation. The number of cases, deaths or case-fatality rates associated with COVID-19 vary strongly across countries and over time within countries [ 51 ]. For example, the case-fatality rates in June 2020 differed substantially between South Korea and Italy, while those of Germany and the United States were in between [ 52 ]. Hale et al. [ 53 ] show for the first phase of the pandemic that policies broadly track the reported COVID-19 cases. Thus, the varying severity of the COVID-19 situation could explain differences in the stringency of measures. Number of cases and deaths are only rough indicators for a country’s actual epidemiological situation: Number of confirmed cases are underestimates of actual cases and depend on testing policy, while number of deaths depend on how each country records and defines COVID-19 deaths. However, this is the only data available policy-makers can base their decisions on.

Apart from the epidemiological situation itself, a country’s resources and its vulnerability to the pandemic might influence the introduction of stringent measures as well. Countries with a low health care system capacity and a high proportion of risk groups for COVID-19, e.g. a large share of elderly population , are in need to introduce strict measures in order to prevent an overload of the health care system. We also assume that countries with a high GDP are able to introduce more stringent measures than countries with a low GDP, because they have more resources to react and are more capable of enduring damaging impacts on the economy due to lockdown measures than countries with a low GDP.

Number of deaths due to the virus, number of cases of people infected (epidemiological situation), share of risk groups, health care system capacity and GDP are common control variables in existing studies on the variation of COVID-19 measures [ 2 , 4 , 5 , 11 ]. While the epidemiological situation and the share of risk groups should only influence the stringency of COVID-19 measures, we argue that the GDP and health care system capacity influence value preferences of the population towards freedom or security as well. A country’s GDP and health care system capacity are indicators of a country’s level of socioeconomic development, which leads to rising levels of existential security. According to the “revised theory of modernization”, existential security results in a shift from emphasis on survival values to emphasis on self-expression values [ 54 ]. Inglehart and Welzel [ 54 ] particularly mention the link between GDP and self-expression values.

3 Material and methods

Data and sample.

The analytic sample consists of 40 countries (20 democracies, 20 autocracies) for which information about the value conflict between freedom and security in the population is available in the World Values Survey (WVS) 2017–2020 dataset [ 55 ]. S1 Table provides a list of all countries included in the analysis. We excluded four countries (Iran, Myanmar, Ukraine, Zimbabwe) where the fieldwork of the WVS 2017–2020 continued until after March 11, 2020, when the WHO had already declared the COVID - 19 outbreak a global pandemic. It is possible that the spread of COVID-19 and first political measures influenced the responses to the question about the value conflict between freedom versus security. In addition, Taiwan was excluded because of its unique trajectory of COVID-19 cases and policies [ 56 ]. Respondents in the WVS were asked the following question: “Most people consider both freedom and security to be important, but if you had to choose between them, which one would you consider more important?” We aggregated this information to the percentage of the population that considers freedom more important than security.

The stringency of policy responses were measured by the Stringency Index provided by the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) dataset (version July 2021; [ 57 ]). This index allows us to track COVID- 19 policy changes; starting from January 1, 2020, it has been measured daily. Varying between 0 and 100 it shows the stringency of lockdown policies, such as school and workplace closing, cancelation of public events and movement restrictions. S2 Table provides an overview of all nine indicators of the stringency index. All indicators have an ordinal scale of severity or stringency; the specific coding is shown in S2 Table as well. Detailed information about the calculation of the index and its indicators can be found in Hale et al. [ 57 ].

Analytic strategy

We estimated random effects models: The models are linear panel regression models (daily observations nested in countries) with random effects (random intercept) at the country level. The models were estimated jointly for all 40 countries as well as separately for democracies (20 countries) and autocracies (20 countries). We distinguish democracies and autocracies using the Regimes of the World typology by Lührmann, Tannenberg, and Lindberg [ 58 ], which is included in the data provided by the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project [ 59 , 60 ]. The analysis was restricted to the time span from February 01 to June 30, 2020, since we are interested in policy reactions during the first wave of the pandemic. We adopted this investigation period from Engler et al. [ 4 ]. In this wave, all countries had limited knowledge about adequate responses to COVID-19. For a robustness check, we estimated all models with different time spans by varying the end date (May 15, 2020; May 30, 2020; June 15, 2020; July 30, 2020) and the results were very similar.

The main models only controlled for variables that we expect to have an effect on both the Stringency Index and on the societal value conflict between freedom and security (confounders) to avoid overcontrol bias [ 61 , 62 ]: (1) gross domestic product (GDP , logged) ; health care system capacity, measured by the (2) number of hospital beds per 1000 people and (3) share of the GDP spent on health care expenditures ; (4) democracy level . We used the data of the World Bank for the GDP (year 2019) and health care expenditures (year 2017), which is included in the World Value Survey 2017–2020 dataset [ 55 ]. The number of hospital beds per 1000 people (most recent year available) was from the OWID COVID-19 data [ 51 ] and the democracy level was measured by the Liberal Democracy Index of the V-Dem Institute (multiplied by 100; [ 59 , 60 ]). GDP and health care system capacity is expected to influence not only the Stringency Index, but also the societal value conflict between freedom and security [ 54 ] (see section “Economic and health factors”). Likewise, the democracy level should not only be relevant for the stringency of COVID-19 policies (see section “Authoritarian versus democratic systems”), but is also likely to influence self-expression values within a population: “According to ‘institutional learning theory’, individuals’ values, preferences and behavior are heavily influenced by the institutional environments within which they operate” [ 63 ].

Main model with GDP, health care system capacity and democracy level as control variables:

The indices i and t denote countries and date, respectively. The unobserved time-constant effect is called c i and u it denotes the time-varying error term.

In addition, we present models that further controlled for five variables that we expect to have an effect solely on the Stringency Index. First, to capture the severity of the COVID-19 situation, we included the (1) daily number of new confirmed COVID-19 cases per million (smoothed, 7-day rolling average; [ 51 ]). As a robustness check we used the daily number of new confirmed COVID-19 deaths per million (smoothed, 7-day rolling average; [ 51 ]) instead and the results were similar. Second, to account for diffusion effects, the models controlled for the (2) worldwide daily average of the Stringency Index (calculated from the OxCGRT data). Third, the models included the proportion of three COVID-19 risk groups. Those are the (3) percentage of the total population aged over 60 years in year 2015 [ 64 ], the (4) percentage of people aged 20–79 who have type 1 or type 2 diabetes in year 2019 [ 65 ], and the (5) obesity prevalence (BMI ≥ 30, crude rates) among adults aged over 20 years in year 2016 [ 66 ].

Model with additional control variables:

Our variable of interest, freedom vs. security, is statistically significant correlated with all control variables, except worldwide average Stringency Index and diabetes prevalence (Pearson’s r, see S3 Table ). However, none of these correlations is higher than 0.5, so there should be no collinearity between freedom vs. security and any of the control variables.

Descriptive statistics

Table 1 presents descriptive statistics for all variables included in the analysis in the three analytic samples (all countries, democracies, autocracies). There are no substantial differences in the average Stringency Index over time between democracies and autocracies. The average percentage of the population that considers freedom more important than security is higher in democracies (33.5%) than in autocracies (26.8%). However, as the range shows, there is a high variation between countries within both regime types. For the distribution of the societal value conflict and its single values for each country see S1 Fig and S1 Table , respectively.

Fig 1 shows the development of the Stringency Index of all countries, democracies, and autocracies separately for countries with a high individual appreciation of freedom versus security and countries with a low individual appreciation of freedom versus security. High appreciation and low appreciation at this point mean that at least or less than 28% of the population consider freedom more important than security, respectively (median split). For autocracies, we find that except for a short period in February, the level of the Stringency Index between February 01 and June 30, 2020 of countries with a high appreciation of freedom versus security is consistently below that of countries with a low appreciation of freedom versus security. For democracies, we do not see this pattern until the end of April 2020. Within democracies, the period between end of March and mid of April 2020 shows an interesting pattern. Democratic countries with a high and low individual appreciation of freedom vs. security have similar levels of the Stringency Index in the beginning. However, at the end of March 2020 the stringency of lockdown measures in democratic countries with a high individual appreciation of freedom vs. security increases to a higher value than that of countries with a low individual appreciation of freedom vs. security and it remains at this level until mid of April 2020. It seems that countries with a high individual appreciation of freedom vs. security overreacted at the very beginning of the pandemic and relaxed their lockdown levels to a level below that of countries with a low individual appreciation of freedom vs. security only at a later point in time. However, it is important to note that the 90% confidence intervals of the lines overlap in all three samples, which means that there is no clear evidence of a difference between the two groups of countries. Moreover, from these descriptive results it is not possible to conclude that such a difference in the stringency of COVID-19 policies would be in fact due to value preferences in the population. The analyses in the next section will account for important confounders of this relationship.

For countries with a high individual appreciation of freedom versus security and countries with a low individual appreciation of freedom versus security (median split: high = at least 31.56%, low = less than 31.56%); for all countries, and separately for democracies and autocracies. Notes : All countries: high: n = 20, low: n = 20; Democracies: high: n = 11, low: n = 9; Autocracies: high: n = 9, low: n = 11.

Impact of value preferences of the population on the stringency of COVID-19 policies

Fig 2 shows the results of the main models that only controlled for variables that we expect to have an effect on both the Stringency Index and on the societal value conflict between freedom and security (estimated for all countries and separately for democracies and autocracies). There is no significant association between value preferences of the population and the Stringency Index in the sample that includes all countries. The coefficient is small and negative. In the sample that includes only democracies, we find a small positive, not significant association. The results of the third model, which was estimated only for autocracies, show a negative, significant association between value preferences of the population and the Stringency Index (p < 0.05). On average, if the percentage of the population that considers freedom more important than security increases by 1.0, the Stringency Index decreases by 0.5, ceteris paribus.

Notes: Coefficients are statistically significant if the 95% confidence intervals do not cover zero. Full regression tables are shown in Tables ​ Tables2 2 and ​ and3 3 (model 5).

For the full regression tables see Tables ​ Tables2 2 and ​ and3. 3 . Model 5 is equivalent to the results shown in Fig 2 and model 6 additionally includes variables that that we expect to have an effect solely on the Stringency Index. Model 1 presents the bivariate relationship without control variables, as suggested by Lenz and Sahn [ 62 ]. To show how the effect size of the societal value conflict between freedom and security changes after including important confounders, the models 2, 3, and 4 only control for GDP, health care system capacity, and democracy level, respectively. Tables ​ Tables2 2 and ​ and3 3 also report two measures of goodness-of-fit, the adjusted overall R-squared and the Bayesian information criterion (BIC). In all three samples (all countries, democracies, autocracies), the goodness-of-fit is highest in model 6, which includes all control variables. However, because our aim is to explore the role of societal value preferences towards freedom or security for COVID-19 policies and not to fully explain the national variation of the stringency index, we do not interpret these measures of goodness-of fit further.

Standard errors in parentheses

*** p < 0.001

** p < 0.01

* p < 0.05

+ p < 0.1

As an additional analysis, we estimated models for all countries that included an interaction between the societal value conflict and the regime type (0 = Autocracy, 1 = Democracy; see S4 Table ) instead of the separate analysis for democracies and autocracies. The interaction term is not statistically significant and we find a negative effect of the societal value conflict on the Stringency Index for autocracies (-0.36) and a positive effect that is close to zero for democracies (-0.36 + 0.41 = 0.05) in model 6, which includes all relevant control variables. However, it is important to note that our research question is not if the effect of the societal value conflict differs between democracies and autocracies, but if there is an effect within democracies and within autocracies. Our split sample analysis showed a small and not statistically significant positive effect of value preferences in the society on the stringency of COVID-19 policies in democracies, but a negative and statistically significant effect in autocracies. Therefore, it seems that there is a negative effect of the societal value conflict between freedom and security on the stringency of COVID-19 policies in autocracies, but not in democracies.

Limitations

One main limitation of our analysis is the limited number of countries under study. We were only able to include countries in the analytic sample for which information about the societal value conflict between freedom and security is available in the WVS 2017–2020 dataset [ 55 ]. Due to the small sample size, our results might be sensible to the samples of countries. However, as a robustness check, we estimated the models excluding different single countries and the results were robust.

Moreover, our analysis is based on the assumption that the measured societal value conflict between freedom and security in the WVS is comparable across different countries. Alemán and Woods [ 67 ] questioned the measurement validity of survival–self-expression values. With respect to freedom and security which is relevant in this study, we might e.g., find self-censorship as well as a social desirability effect in favor of security as a consequence of autocratic indoctrination. However, Inglehart and Welzel and their co-authors have shown in numerous publications that measured values from the WVS are strongly linked to an extremely large number of social indicators—such as prosperity, equality, or democracy—which supports the cross-country comparability [ 68 , 69 ].

One advantage of the random effects model is that it accounts for within- and between-country variation. However, it is not possible to identify a causal effect of the societal value conflict between freedom and security in the population on the stringency of COVID-19 measures, because there could still be unobserved heterogeneity that our analysis cannot account for. Although we attempted to account for all relevant observable confounders, we cannot completely eliminate the possibility that the assumption of exogeneity of both time-constant and time-varying unobserved heterogeneity may be violated.

5 Conclusion and discussion

The results indicated a negative association between the societal value conflict “freedom versus security” and the stringency of lockdown policies in autocracies, but not in democracies. This supports our anticipation that during the COVID-19 pandemic governments in democratic political systems are less responsive to their citizens’ value preferences for freedom, democratic rights and liberties than governments in autocratic political systems to their citizens’ value preference for security.

Our findings highlight how the Corona crisis provides an opportunity for autocracies to respond to value preferences of the population in a value conflict and thereby might gain legitimacy in times of crises. Recent studies on regime legitimation strategies in autocracies [ 70 – 73 ] emphasize specific support (first proposed by Easton [ 74 ]) as a source of legitimation. It is based on the regime’s claim to successfully satisfy citizens’ demands. Therefore, several authors subsume specific support to the type of performance-based legitimacy (e.g., [ 70 , 75 ]). Instead, Gerschewski [ 71 ] argues that support should be considered to be a superset of legitimacy. His semantic analysis reveals that support also subsumes actors who hold anti-regime beliefs. These actors then behave as if they were in favor of the autocratic regime. In addition, we can also argue that there is an element of a democratic-procedural legitimation. Dukalskis & Gerschewski [ 73 ] distinguish two dimensions of democratic-procedural legitimation: (seemingly) rational elections, and responsiveness to the demands of the citizens. Seen from a theoretical perspective, autocracies have three advantages then: Their obvious capacity to respond to citizens’ demands for security strengthens their performance-based legitimacy, their democratic-procedural legitimation and the support by those citizens who actually hold anti-regime beliefs. Our study therefore provides quantitative support for the hypothesis that the Corona crisis will possibly strengthen autocratic regimes and weaken democratic political systems as the democracies fail to satisfy citizens’ demands for freedom while the autocracies respond to citizen’s demand for security (see also [ 76 ]). This hypothesis should be investigated by further studies. E.g., studies on the satisfaction with democracy indicate that only richer democracies might be affected and perceive a decline in citizens’ satisfaction with the way democracy works in their country [ 77 ].

The effort to managing value conflict between health security and individual freedoms may result in different dominant forms. Applying the delineation by Stewart [ 20 ] incrementalism and cycling may dominate in democracies because they have to deal with the value conflict beyond institutional limitations while a bias in favor of security may dominate in autocracies. This is not only a formal difference: incrementalist and oscillating policies are stressful for the citizens. They generate political emotions against democratic governments and their COVID-19 policies. Bias towards security, on the other hand, creates no additional stress in autocracies, which are in any case used to suppress any opposition. Future studies should investigate whether such a difference can be empirically found.

Supporting information

Funding statement.

This study was funded by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences ad hoc-group grant to the project ‚Zukunftswerte‘ (2019-2022; https://zukunftswerte.badw.de/en/working-group.html ). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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The Differences Between Freedom And Security: How Not To Step Over The Line

Gregory V. Chapman

April 26, 2020

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Open Access

Peer-reviewed

Research Article

The value conflict between freedom and security: Explaining the variation of COVID-19 policies in democracies and autocracies

Roles Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Department of Sociology, University of Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany

Roles Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision, Validation, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations Department of Sociology, University of Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany, The State Institute for Family Research (ifb), Bamberg, Germany

• Nicole J. Saam, 
• Carmen Friedrich, 
• Henriette Engelhardt

• Published: September 9, 2022
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274270
• Reader Comments

In the name of health security, individual freedoms were constrained in an unprecedented way in many countries, democratic or authoritarian, all over the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet the constraints have not been consistent across countries, which motivates this paper to examine the relevance of value preferences towards freedom or security in the society for COVID-19 policies. Based on data for 40 democratic and authoritarian countries, the analyses show that the variation in the stringency of COVID-19 policies can be explained by value preferences of the population only in autocracies. In democracies, however, we do not find such a relationship. Governments in democratic political systems, we argue, are responsive to their constitutions and face prosecution by the judiciary if they violate the law or provisions of the constitution, limiting their capacity to implement strong COVID-19 policies. Nevertheless, their COVID-19 policies restricted citizens’ freedoms and liberties, which means that these policies were rather not responsive to citizens’ preferences for freedom, democratic rights and liberties. By highlighting how autocracies respond to their citizens’ value preferences for security, this paper contributes to a better understanding of how autocracies might gain legitimacy in times of crises.

Citation: Saam NJ, Friedrich C, Engelhardt H (2022) The value conflict between freedom and security: Explaining the variation of COVID-19 policies in democracies and autocracies. PLoS ONE 17(9): e0274270. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274270

Editor: Alessandro Pluchino, University of Catania, ITALY

Received: January 24, 2022; Accepted: August 24, 2022; Published: September 9, 2022

Copyright: © 2022 Saam et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: The data underlying the results presented in the study are available from the World Values Survey (WVS) research program ( https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp ) and from the Oxford Covid-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) project ( https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/research-projects/covid-19-government-response-tracker ). The authors confirm that the data is third-party data and that they had no special access privileges other researchers would not have. The data files can be downloaded without restrictions.

Funding: This study was funded by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences ad hoc-group grant to the project ‚Zukunftswerte‘ (2019-2022; https://zukunftswerte.badw.de/en/working-group.html ). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

1 Introduction

In the name of health security, individual freedoms were constrained in an unprecedented way in many countries, democratic or authoritarian, all over the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nation-wide lockdowns have become standard policies in fighting the spread of COVID-19. Yet the constraints have not been consistent across countries, which have motivated researchers to explain variations across jurisdictions [ 1 – 3 ]. Studies on policies in democracies find that the constitutional protection of individual liberties had a negative effect on restrictions of freedoms [ 4 ]. Studies involving democracies and autocracies offer a mixed picture: Some find that democracies were slower in adapting COVID-19 policies [ 5 , 6 ], while others find that democracy is not significant in predicting the speed of government stringency [ 7 ]. Frey et al. [ 8 ] show that autocracies have been stricter in their mobility restriction and contact tracing policies. Lins et al. [ 9 ], however, find no differences in social distancing policies between autocracies and democracies, and the level of democracy was not associated with the number of tests for COVID-19 [ 10 ]. Two studies include the overall freedom of the country: Toshkov et al. [ 3 ] find that a higher Freedom House global freedom score was related to a slower policy reaction in European countries, while Gutkowski [ 11 ] find that there was no relationship between lockdown timing and the degree of freedom in a sample of 128 countries. Toshkov et al. [ 3 ] conclude that “countries with higher freedom might have also been more reluctant to restrict the personal liberties and freedoms of citizens.” We do not find, however, an inclusion of the value conflict between (health) security and (individual) freedoms in statistical models that analyze the variation of COVID-19 policies across democracies or autocracies. This value conflict is extensively discussed in legal studies (e.g., for Germany, see [ 12 , 13 ]), political philosophy (e.g., [ 14 , 15 ]), political psychology (e.g., [ 16 , 17 ]), and economic history (e.g., [ 18 ]). From all these perspectives, this value conflict is considered to be relevant in times of pandemic. In Bilgen’s words, the question is “how a democratic order can overcome the security crisis while preserving its fundamental principles, such as individual freedom as a highest value” [13, p. 371]. Then, concepts (“securitas libertatis” [ 13 ]) and principles (“SAFE principles” [ 16 ]) are developed to guide preservation of supremacy, preponderance or primacy of one of both values or to restore the balance between freedom and security. Delanty [ 14 ] argues, that philosophical theories, such as utilitarianism and libertarianism, and ideas from philosophers such as Kant, Foucault, Agamben and Zizek, as well as nudge theory have shaped COVID-19 policies and draw attention to the problem of liberty or biopolitical securitization. He concludes that “the Coronavirus is more than a pathogen that threatens the lives of many people, but democracy is also in danger from the recent experiments with emergency government. … populations … have been disciplined in the late Foucauldian sense of the term to desire safety over liberty” [14, p. 14f.]. Vasilopoulos et al. [ 17 ] reveal the emotional mechanisms that lead citizens to decide to sacrifice their civil liberties in the light of threatened health security. We therefore claim that value preferences for freedom and security should be considered in explanations of variations of COVID-19 policies across jurisdictions. We find this value conflict also in the society, e.g., people were discussing the pros and cons in this value conflict in the social media. Political decision makers respond to value preferences in the society [ 19 – 21 ], we argue, however in different degrees. Since policy choices cannot simultaneously incorporate the totality of societal values, they are necessarily the selective result of competitive processes, favoring certain values over others, and excluding some values from the discourse altogether [ 20 ]. Distinguishing democracies and authoritarian regimes, our analyses show based on data for 40 countries that the variation in the stringency of COVID-19 policies in autocracies can be explained by value preferences of the population in this value conflict between freedom and security. In democracies, however, we do not find such a relationship. Governments in democratic political systems, we argue, are responsive to their constitutions and face prosecution by the judiciary if they violate the law or provisions of the constitution, limiting their capacity to implement strong COVID-19 policies. Nevertheless, their COVID-19 policies restricted citizens’ freedoms and liberties, which means that these policies were rather not responsive to citizens’ general preferences for freedom, democratic rights and liberties. By highlighting how autocracies respond to their citizens’ value preferences for security, this paper contributes to a better understanding of how autocracies might gain legitimacy in times of crises. Our study therefore provides quantitative support for the hypothesis that the Corona crisis will possibly strengthen autocratic regimes and weaken democratic political systems as the democracies fail to satisfy citizens’ demands for freedom while the autocracies respond to citizen’s demand for security.

The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 elaborates on the theories and previous findings that aim to explain variations in state COVID-19 responses–the relevance of values in politics, the differences found for democracies and authoritarian regimes, the relevance of policy diffusion as well as economic and health factors. In section 3, we explain material and methods. In section 4, we present our results. There are no substantial differences in the average stringency of COVID-19 policies over time between democracies and autocracies. Only the random effects models estimated for autocracies show a negative, significant association between value preferences of the population and the stringency of COVID-19 policies. In the conclusion, we argue that the Corona crisis provides an opportunity for autocracies to respond to value preferences of the population in a value conflict and thereby might gain legitimacy in times of crises.

2 Theories and previous findings

Values and politics.

Engler et al. [4, p. 2] as well as many others who research into the COVID-19 policies argue that governments are confronted with the “dilemma of weighing public health goals against democratic norms, rights and freedoms” resp. handling the trade-off between public health responses and democratic principles. We argue that this dilemma reflects a classical value conflict–the conflict between security and freedom, here between health security [ 22 ] and individual freedoms. In the context of the Corona crisis, health security and individual freedoms can be considered to be political values, not just individual values. Political values are correlated with attitudes towards policy goals [ 23 – 25 ], preferences for political parties [ 26 ], and electoral behavior [ 27 – 29 ]. We therefore argue that for political elites, it is rational to consider the value preferences in the society when adopting measures that, during normal times, either contradict fundamental democratic principles, such as freedom of movement or freedom of assembly, or are extraordinary anyway, e.g., the so-called “social distancing”. Toshkov et al. [ 3 ] distinguish two theoretical perspectives: (1) Party-political ideologies are related to the commitment to particular social values. COVID-19 policies are earlier or later based on these commitments. In particular, parties emphasizing traditional, authoritarian and nationalist values in their ideology, adopt faster and more restrictive COVID-19 policies. (2) Societal values and the overall freedom of the country influence COVID-19 policies. In more free societies, there is an appreciation of personal and collective liberties and freedoms–they are “protected by civil society” [3, p. 10] which imposes higher thresholds for governments to justify and enforce restrictions on fundamental freedoms. It is this latter theoretical perspective, which we investigate in this study, but we look at it from two sides and consider two societal values–freedom and security. We look at the trade-off between (health) security and (individual) freedoms considering not just the single values [ 30 ] but the value conflict. Stewart [ 20 ] delineates six forms of managing value conflict used by political and bureaucratic executives: structural separation, hybridization, casuistry, incrementalism, bias, and cycling.

Authoritarian versus democratic systems

We claim that democracies and authoritarian regimes respond differently to this societal value conflict. In democracies, politicians should hesitate to limit individual liberties because they are inherent to democracy [ 31 ], and because negative public perceptions of restrictions of personal freedoms may jeopardize their reelection [ 32 ]. Differences in COVID-19 policies between authoritarian and democratic political systems were found by several empirical studies. In particular, democracies were slower in adapting the new policies [ 5 , 6 ] or could possibly have been so [ 33 ]. The stronger the democratic institutions, the slower has the reaction in OECD countries been [ 2 ]. Autocracies have been more strict in their mobility restriction and contact tracing policies [ 8 ]. In democracies, the constitutional protection of individual liberties had a negative effect on restrictions of freedoms [ 4 ]. In democracies, political elites know that they are accountable [ 34 – 36 ]. Once the pandemic is over, or even before, other political as well as societal actors may question the legitimacy and proportionality of the COVID-19 policies and hold decision-makers accountable for their decisions. E.g., Maor & Howlett [1, p. 236] quote Israeli Minister of Finance Moshe Kahlon who argued that “surely there will be a national committee of inquiry, and no one wants [to have] to explain why there are Israeli corpses”. Such as Engler et al. [ 4 ], we argue that the strength of democratic institutions influences how political decision-makers in democracies handle the trade-off between health security and individual freedoms. The willingness to constrain civil liberties decreases with the degree to which democratic norms, rights and freedoms are protected and respected in non-pandemic times or times without a major crisis. The legal framework of democracies (rule of law; [ 37 , 38 ]), and here we go beyond Engler et al. [ 4 ], establishes a point of reference for decision-makers which outweighs the value preferences in the society. Created as a safeguard against the misuse of power by governments [ 39 ], strong democratic institutions also establish an impediment or check to rely and respond directly to moods, attitudes or value preferences in the society [ 40 , 41 ].

Policy diffusion

In the name of health security, not only individual freedoms were constrained in an unprecedented way in many countries. Also, other measures implemented were very similar, although with some variation, hinting to politics of policy diffusion. Note that some measures, such as the closure of schools, are laid out in national pandemic plans, while others are not, e.g., the closure of borders, which means that the enforcement of the former cannot easily be interpreted as an indicator of policy diffusion. Policy diffusion has been defined as a process where policies in one political unit influence the politics of other units [ 42 ]. Already Meyer and Rowan [ 43 ] have argued that policies can spread because policy makers aim to conform to dominant international norms, in the Corona crisis to the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO), while considering also domestic constraints which results in a legislation that locally adapts policies to serve a domestic constituency. Four mechanisms are proposed to explain policy diffusion: learning, competition, coercion and emulation. Gilardi & Wasserfallen [ 42 ] derive a dominant stylized model of policy diffusion from the relevant literature in international relations and studies in federalism and argue that this model is based on the assumption that decisions are the result of fact-based assessments. They claim that instead policy diffusion should more be seen as a political process. E.g., diffusion may also involve unsuccessful policies, may be based on ideologically biased learning, may be shaped at the issue-definition stage or based on empirically false assumptions. In this framework, policy diffusion during the Corona crisis can considered to be based on the mechanism of emulation. Emulation scholars emphasize the social construction of appropriate policies [ 44 ], and that international organizations, such as the WHO, not only construct the norms fostering the appropriateness of policies but also promote policy diffusion [ 45 , 46 ]. Such policies may be considered as legitimate [ 47 ]. However, in many cases, it is quite difficult to distinguish learning or coercion from emulation. E.g., in the Corona crisis, countries may also learn from mistakes of neighbouring countries’ COVID-19 policies; or announcements of the WHO together with announced financial support by other international or transnational organizations rather coerce some poorer countries to implement the proposed policies. Recently, Blatter et al. [ 48 ] have presented an alternative typology of policy diffusion, based on four motivational mechanisms (called interest-, rights-, ideology-, and recognition-driven policy diffusion) in an effort to overcome inconsistent operationalizations in empirical diffusion studies shown by Maggetti & Gilardi [ 49 ]. However, this typology is not yet suited to study diffusion processes in autocracies. In their empirical study on the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic Rausis & Hoffmeyer‐Zlotnik [ 50 ] found tentative evidence for processes of policy diffusion in the field of mobility restrictions in Europe (EU, EFTA and UK). Engler et al. [ 4 ] and Sebhatu et al. [ 2 ] found diffusion effects for COVID-19 policies in European democracies and OECD countries, respectively.

Economic and health factors

While diffusion effects may be present, we expect that the stringency of COVID-19 policies adopted by governments generally follow the epidemiological situation. The number of cases, deaths or case-fatality rates associated with COVID-19 vary strongly across countries and over time within countries [ 51 ]. For example, the case-fatality rates in June 2020 differed substantially between South Korea and Italy, while those of Germany and the United States were in between [ 52 ]. Hale et al. [ 53 ] show for the first phase of the pandemic that policies broadly track the reported COVID-19 cases. Thus, the varying severity of the COVID-19 situation could explain differences in the stringency of measures. Number of cases and deaths are only rough indicators for a country’s actual epidemiological situation: Number of confirmed cases are underestimates of actual cases and depend on testing policy, while number of deaths depend on how each country records and defines COVID-19 deaths. However, this is the only data available policy-makers can base their decisions on.

Apart from the epidemiological situation itself, a country’s resources and its vulnerability to the pandemic might influence the introduction of stringent measures as well. Countries with a low health care system capacity and a high proportion of risk groups for COVID-19, e.g. a large share of elderly population , are in need to introduce strict measures in order to prevent an overload of the health care system. We also assume that countries with a high GDP are able to introduce more stringent measures than countries with a low GDP, because they have more resources to react and are more capable of enduring damaging impacts on the economy due to lockdown measures than countries with a low GDP.

Number of deaths due to the virus, number of cases of people infected (epidemiological situation), share of risk groups, health care system capacity and GDP are common control variables in existing studies on the variation of COVID-19 measures [ 2 , 4 , 5 , 11 ]. While the epidemiological situation and the share of risk groups should only influence the stringency of COVID-19 measures, we argue that the GDP and health care system capacity influence value preferences of the population towards freedom or security as well. A country’s GDP and health care system capacity are indicators of a country’s level of socioeconomic development, which leads to rising levels of existential security. According to the “revised theory of modernization”, existential security results in a shift from emphasis on survival values to emphasis on self-expression values [ 54 ]. Inglehart and Welzel [ 54 ] particularly mention the link between GDP and self-expression values.

3 Material and methods

Data and sample.

The analytic sample consists of 40 countries (20 democracies, 20 autocracies) for which information about the value conflict between freedom and security in the population is available in the World Values Survey (WVS) 2017–2020 dataset [ 55 ]. S1 Table provides a list of all countries included in the analysis. We excluded four countries (Iran, Myanmar, Ukraine, Zimbabwe) where the fieldwork of the WVS 2017–2020 continued until after March 11, 2020, when the WHO had already declared the COVID - 19 outbreak a global pandemic. It is possible that the spread of COVID-19 and first political measures influenced the responses to the question about the value conflict between freedom versus security. In addition, Taiwan was excluded because of its unique trajectory of COVID-19 cases and policies [ 56 ]. Respondents in the WVS were asked the following question: “Most people consider both freedom and security to be important, but if you had to choose between them, which one would you consider more important?” We aggregated this information to the percentage of the population that considers freedom more important than security.

The stringency of policy responses were measured by the Stringency Index provided by the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) dataset (version July 2021; [ 57 ]). This index allows us to track COVID- 19 policy changes; starting from January 1, 2020, it has been measured daily. Varying between 0 and 100 it shows the stringency of lockdown policies, such as school and workplace closing, cancelation of public events and movement restrictions. S2 Table provides an overview of all nine indicators of the stringency index. All indicators have an ordinal scale of severity or stringency; the specific coding is shown in S2 Table as well. Detailed information about the calculation of the index and its indicators can be found in Hale et al. [ 57 ].

Analytic strategy

We estimated random effects models: The models are linear panel regression models (daily observations nested in countries) with random effects (random intercept) at the country level. The models were estimated jointly for all 40 countries as well as separately for democracies (20 countries) and autocracies (20 countries). We distinguish democracies and autocracies using the Regimes of the World typology by Lührmann, Tannenberg, and Lindberg [ 58 ], which is included in the data provided by the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project [ 59 , 60 ]. The analysis was restricted to the time span from February 01 to June 30, 2020, since we are interested in policy reactions during the first wave of the pandemic. We adopted this investigation period from Engler et al. [ 4 ]. In this wave, all countries had limited knowledge about adequate responses to COVID-19. For a robustness check, we estimated all models with different time spans by varying the end date (May 15, 2020; May 30, 2020; June 15, 2020; July 30, 2020) and the results were very similar.

The main models only controlled for variables that we expect to have an effect on both the Stringency Index and on the societal value conflict between freedom and security (confounders) to avoid overcontrol bias [ 61 , 62 ]: (1) gross domestic product (GDP , logged) ; health care system capacity, measured by the (2) number of hospital beds per 1000 people and (3) share of the GDP spent on health care expenditures ; (4) democracy level . We used the data of the World Bank for the GDP (year 2019) and health care expenditures (year 2017), which is included in the World Value Survey 2017–2020 dataset [ 55 ]. The number of hospital beds per 1000 people (most recent year available) was from the OWID COVID-19 data [ 51 ] and the democracy level was measured by the Liberal Democracy Index of the V-Dem Institute (multiplied by 100; [ 59 , 60 ]). GDP and health care system capacity is expected to influence not only the Stringency Index, but also the societal value conflict between freedom and security [ 54 ] (see section “Economic and health factors”). Likewise, the democracy level should not only be relevant for the stringency of COVID-19 policies (see section “Authoritarian versus democratic systems”), but is also likely to influence self-expression values within a population: “According to ‘institutional learning theory’, individuals’ values, preferences and behavior are heavily influenced by the institutional environments within which they operate” [ 63 ].

The indices i and t denote countries and date, respectively. The unobserved time-constant effect is called c i and u it denotes the time-varying error term.

In addition, we present models that further controlled for five variables that we expect to have an effect solely on the Stringency Index. First, to capture the severity of the COVID-19 situation, we included the (1) daily number of new confirmed COVID-19 cases per million (smoothed, 7-day rolling average; [ 51 ]). As a robustness check we used the daily number of new confirmed COVID-19 deaths per million (smoothed, 7-day rolling average; [ 51 ]) instead and the results were similar. Second, to account for diffusion effects, the models controlled for the (2) worldwide daily average of the Stringency Index (calculated from the OxCGRT data). Third, the models included the proportion of three COVID-19 risk groups. Those are the (3) percentage of the total population aged over 60 years in year 2015 [ 64 ], the (4) percentage of people aged 20–79 who have type 1 or type 2 diabetes in year 2019 [ 65 ], and the (5) obesity prevalence (BMI ≥ 30, crude rates) among adults aged over 20 years in year 2016 [ 66 ].

Our variable of interest, freedom vs. security, is statistically significant correlated with all control variables, except worldwide average Stringency Index and diabetes prevalence (Pearson’s r, see S3 Table ). However, none of these correlations is higher than 0.5, so there should be no collinearity between freedom vs. security and any of the control variables.

Descriptive statistics

Table 1 presents descriptive statistics for all variables included in the analysis in the three analytic samples (all countries, democracies, autocracies). There are no substantial differences in the average Stringency Index over time between democracies and autocracies. The average percentage of the population that considers freedom more important than security is higher in democracies (33.5%) than in autocracies (26.8%). However, as the range shows, there is a high variation between countries within both regime types. For the distribution of the societal value conflict and its single values for each country see S1 Fig and S1 Table , respectively.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274270.t001

Fig 1 shows the development of the Stringency Index of all countries, democracies, and autocracies separately for countries with a high individual appreciation of freedom versus security and countries with a low individual appreciation of freedom versus security. High appreciation and low appreciation at this point mean that at least or less than 28% of the population consider freedom more important than security, respectively (median split). For autocracies, we find that except for a short period in February, the level of the Stringency Index between February 01 and June 30, 2020 of countries with a high appreciation of freedom versus security is consistently below that of countries with a low appreciation of freedom versus security. For democracies, we do not see this pattern until the end of April 2020. Within democracies, the period between end of March and mid of April 2020 shows an interesting pattern. Democratic countries with a high and low individual appreciation of freedom vs. security have similar levels of the Stringency Index in the beginning. However, at the end of March 2020 the stringency of lockdown measures in democratic countries with a high individual appreciation of freedom vs. security increases to a higher value than that of countries with a low individual appreciation of freedom vs. security and it remains at this level until mid of April 2020. It seems that countries with a high individual appreciation of freedom vs. security overreacted at the very beginning of the pandemic and relaxed their lockdown levels to a level below that of countries with a low individual appreciation of freedom vs. security only at a later point in time. However, it is important to note that the 90% confidence intervals of the lines overlap in all three samples, which means that there is no clear evidence of a difference between the two groups of countries. Moreover, from these descriptive results it is not possible to conclude that such a difference in the stringency of COVID-19 policies would be in fact due to value preferences in the population. The analyses in the next section will account for important confounders of this relationship.

For countries with a high individual appreciation of freedom versus security and countries with a low individual appreciation of freedom versus security (median split: high = at least 31.56%, low = less than 31.56%); for all countries, and separately for democracies and autocracies. Notes : All countries: high: n = 20, low: n = 20; Democracies: high: n = 11, low: n = 9; Autocracies: high: n = 9, low: n = 11.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274270.g001

Impact of value preferences of the population on the stringency of COVID-19 policies

Fig 2 shows the results of the main models that only controlled for variables that we expect to have an effect on both the Stringency Index and on the societal value conflict between freedom and security (estimated for all countries and separately for democracies and autocracies). There is no significant association between value preferences of the population and the Stringency Index in the sample that includes all countries. The coefficient is small and negative. In the sample that includes only democracies, we find a small positive, not significant association. The results of the third model, which was estimated only for autocracies, show a negative, significant association between value preferences of the population and the Stringency Index (p < 0.05). On average, if the percentage of the population that considers freedom more important than security increases by 1.0, the Stringency Index decreases by 0.5, ceteris paribus.

Notes: Coefficients are statistically significant if the 95% confidence intervals do not cover zero. Full regression tables are shown in Tables 2 and 3 (model 5).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274270.g002

For the full regression tables see Tables 2 and 3 . Model 5 is equivalent to the results shown in Fig 2 and model 6 additionally includes variables that that we expect to have an effect solely on the Stringency Index. Model 1 presents the bivariate relationship without control variables, as suggested by Lenz and Sahn [ 62 ]. To show how the effect size of the societal value conflict between freedom and security changes after including important confounders, the models 2, 3, and 4 only control for GDP, health care system capacity, and democracy level, respectively. Tables 2 and 3 also report two measures of goodness-of-fit, the adjusted overall R-squared and the Bayesian information criterion (BIC). In all three samples (all countries, democracies, autocracies), the goodness-of-fit is highest in model 6, which includes all control variables. However, because our aim is to explore the role of societal value preferences towards freedom or security for COVID-19 policies and not to fully explain the national variation of the stringency index, we do not interpret these measures of goodness-of fit further.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274270.t002

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274270.t003

As an additional analysis, we estimated models for all countries that included an interaction between the societal value conflict and the regime type (0 = Autocracy, 1 = Democracy; see S4 Table ) instead of the separate analysis for democracies and autocracies. The interaction term is not statistically significant and we find a negative effect of the societal value conflict on the Stringency Index for autocracies (-0.36) and a positive effect that is close to zero for democracies (-0.36 + 0.41 = 0.05) in model 6, which includes all relevant control variables. However, it is important to note that our research question is not if the effect of the societal value conflict differs between democracies and autocracies, but if there is an effect within democracies and within autocracies. Our split sample analysis showed a small and not statistically significant positive effect of value preferences in the society on the stringency of COVID-19 policies in democracies, but a negative and statistically significant effect in autocracies. Therefore, it seems that there is a negative effect of the societal value conflict between freedom and security on the stringency of COVID-19 policies in autocracies, but not in democracies.

Limitations

One main limitation of our analysis is the limited number of countries under study. We were only able to include countries in the analytic sample for which information about the societal value conflict between freedom and security is available in the WVS 2017–2020 dataset [ 55 ]. Due to the small sample size, our results might be sensible to the samples of countries. However, as a robustness check, we estimated the models excluding different single countries and the results were robust.

Moreover, our analysis is based on the assumption that the measured societal value conflict between freedom and security in the WVS is comparable across different countries. Alemán and Woods [ 67 ] questioned the measurement validity of survival–self-expression values. With respect to freedom and security which is relevant in this study, we might e.g., find self-censorship as well as a social desirability effect in favor of security as a consequence of autocratic indoctrination. However, Inglehart and Welzel and their co-authors have shown in numerous publications that measured values from the WVS are strongly linked to an extremely large number of social indicators—such as prosperity, equality, or democracy—which supports the cross-country comparability [ 68 , 69 ].

One advantage of the random effects model is that it accounts for within- and between-country variation. However, it is not possible to identify a causal effect of the societal value conflict between freedom and security in the population on the stringency of COVID-19 measures, because there could still be unobserved heterogeneity that our analysis cannot account for. Although we attempted to account for all relevant observable confounders, we cannot completely eliminate the possibility that the assumption of exogeneity of both time-constant and time-varying unobserved heterogeneity may be violated.

5 Conclusion and discussion

The results indicated a negative association between the societal value conflict “freedom versus security” and the stringency of lockdown policies in autocracies, but not in democracies. This supports our anticipation that during the COVID-19 pandemic governments in democratic political systems are less responsive to their citizens’ value preferences for freedom, democratic rights and liberties than governments in autocratic political systems to their citizens’ value preference for security.

Our findings highlight how the Corona crisis provides an opportunity for autocracies to respond to value preferences of the population in a value conflict and thereby might gain legitimacy in times of crises. Recent studies on regime legitimation strategies in autocracies [ 70 – 73 ] emphasize specific support (first proposed by Easton [ 74 ]) as a source of legitimation. It is based on the regime’s claim to successfully satisfy citizens’ demands. Therefore, several authors subsume specific support to the type of performance-based legitimacy (e.g., [ 70 , 75 ]). Instead, Gerschewski [ 71 ] argues that support should be considered to be a superset of legitimacy. His semantic analysis reveals that support also subsumes actors who hold anti-regime beliefs. These actors then behave as if they were in favor of the autocratic regime. In addition, we can also argue that there is an element of a democratic-procedural legitimation. Dukalskis & Gerschewski [ 73 ] distinguish two dimensions of democratic-procedural legitimation: (seemingly) rational elections, and responsiveness to the demands of the citizens. Seen from a theoretical perspective, autocracies have three advantages then: Their obvious capacity to respond to citizens’ demands for security strengthens their performance-based legitimacy, their democratic-procedural legitimation and the support by those citizens who actually hold anti-regime beliefs. Our study therefore provides quantitative support for the hypothesis that the Corona crisis will possibly strengthen autocratic regimes and weaken democratic political systems as the democracies fail to satisfy citizens’ demands for freedom while the autocracies respond to citizen’s demand for security (see also [ 76 ]). This hypothesis should be investigated by further studies. E.g., studies on the satisfaction with democracy indicate that only richer democracies might be affected and perceive a decline in citizens’ satisfaction with the way democracy works in their country [ 77 ].

The effort to managing value conflict between health security and individual freedoms may result in different dominant forms. Applying the delineation by Stewart [ 20 ] incrementalism and cycling may dominate in democracies because they have to deal with the value conflict beyond institutional limitations while a bias in favor of security may dominate in autocracies. This is not only a formal difference: incrementalist and oscillating policies are stressful for the citizens. They generate political emotions against democratic governments and their COVID-19 policies. Bias towards security, on the other hand, creates no additional stress in autocracies, which are in any case used to suppress any opposition. Future studies should investigate whether such a difference can be empirically found.

Supporting information

S1 fig. distribution of the percentage of the population that considers freedom more important than security..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274270.s001

S1 Table. List of countries and the percentage of the population that considers freedom more important than security.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274270.s002

S2 Table. Indicators of the Stringency Index.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274270.s003

S3 Table. Pairwise correlations.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274270.s004

S4 Table. Random effects models for the Stringency Index with interaction term between regime type and freedom vs. security, all countries (n = 40).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274270.s005

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In Defense of Liberty: The Relationship Between Security and Freedom

Select a Section 1 /0

Delivered June 3, 2008

Nile Gardiner , Ph.D.: Good morning. Welcome to the Heritage Foundation and the fifth Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture.

The Margaret Thatcher Lecture series began in Sep­tember 2006, with a major speech by former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky on the subject, "Is Free­dom for Everyone?" It was followed by lectures on economic freedom and religious freedom by Hernan­do de Soto and Michael Novak, and by Ambassador John Bolton's lecture "Does the United Nations Advance the Cause of Freedom?"

Our distinguished speaker today is Victor Davis Han­son, who will address the theme, "In Defense of Liberty: The Relationship Between Security and Freedom."

Dr. Hanson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Insti­tution, Stanford University; Professor Emeritus at Cal­ifornia University, Fresno; and a nationally syndicated columnist. He is also the Wayne and Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, where he teaches courses in military history and classical culture.

Dr. Hanson has served as a visiting professor of classics at Stanford University and as the Visiting Shifrin Chair of Military History at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis. He received the Manhattan Institute's Wriston Lectureship in 2004 and the 2006 Nimitz Lectureship in Military History at U.C. Berkeley.

Victor Davis Hanson is the author of hundreds of articles, book reviews, scholarly papers, and newspa­per editorials on matters ranging from Greek, agrar­ian, and military history to foreign affairs, domestic politics, and contemporary culture.

He is one of America's most distinguished classi­cal scholars, and has written or edited thirteen books, including Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece ; The Western Way of War ;  The Wars of the Ancient Greeks ; Carnage and Culture ;  An Autumn of War ; Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Still Deter­mine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think , and, most recently, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War, which was named one of the New York Times Nota­ble 100 Books of 2006.

Victor Davis Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 and is one of the premier military historians of our time. We are honored to have him with us today to deliver the Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture.

Nile Gardiner, Ph.D. , is Director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

Victor Davis Hanson: There cannot be freedom without security nor true security without freedom. The Greeks from the very beginning understood this symbiosis between the two, and framed the nature of the relationship-and occa­sional antithesis-between these necessary poles. The historian Thucydides, for example, makes Per­icles, in his famous funeral oration, talk in depth about the nature of democratic military service and sacrifice that are the linchpins of the freedom of Athens, and how any short-term disadvantages that may harm an open society at war are more than compensated by the creativity, exuberance, and democratic zeal that free peoples bring to war.

Because, like all democratic leaders, Pericles knew the charge that liberal peoples were prone to indiscipline and incapable of collective sacrifice in times of peril, he made the argument that consensu­al societies in extremis fight as well-disciplined as closed, oligarchic communities, and yet still enjoy the advantages that accrue to liberal societies.

We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, al­though the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality; trusting less in system and policy than to the native spirit of our citi­zens; while in education, where our rivals from their very cradles by a painful discipline seek after manliness, at Athens we live exactly as we please, and yet are just as ready to en­counter every legitimate danger.

In contrast, authors as diverse as Herodotus, Xenophon, and Aristotle remind us that the king, tyrant, and autocrat live insecure lives, since their reign is based on fear and instilled terror, and thus they dare not ever lessen their grip for an instant, lest both the people and the military turn on their despised government.

The long history of Western civilization-the Persian War, the Punic Wars, the Napoleonic Wars, World Wars I and II, the Cold War-often suggests that free peoples, if slow to confront enemies on the horizon, nevertheless have been able more often than not to defeat their autocratic enemies. That is why today the West is defined by consensual gov­ernments rather than something more akin to the Napoleonic, Hitlerian, or Stalinist modes of rule.

In other words, the Western tradition of civilian-controlled militaries erred on the side of openness, with the assurance that, when war came, the advan­tages of free speech, expression, and informality would more than outweigh those of discipline, rote, and authoritarianism that their dictatorial enemies embrace.

The Balance of Freedom and Security

The key for Western societies in times of peril has been to calibrate the proper balance between personal freedom and collective military prepared­ness and readiness. Often authoritarianism-Rome in the imperial period, Medieval monarchies, France under Napoleon, the fascism of Italy and Germany-has sacrificed personal liberties in pref­erence for security concerns and militarist cultures.

Other Western societies, often in reaction to recent bloody wars, have erred in the opposite fash­ion on the side of disarmament and appeasement, and lost their liberty as a consequence of not being able to provide security for their own peoples. Here one thinks of the fate of Athens in the age of Demos­thenes or France of 1940.

But more often the dilemma is not so black and white. Abraham Lincoln, and later Andrew Johnson, suspended habeas corpus in some border states to detain pro-Confederate sympathizers, and later Ku Klux Klan organizers. In World War II, the United States censored news from the front, hid information about military disasters, tried and executed German saboteurs in secret military tribunals, and wire­tapped the phones of suspected enemy sympathizers- and yet preserved the Constitution while fighting a global war with a military of over 12 million.

Since September 11, 2001, Western societies have struggled with this age-old tension between freedom and security concerns, and a number of dilemmas have arisen.

With passage of the Patriot Act, the establish­ment of the Guantanamo detention center, court-approved wiretaps, renditions of terrorist suspects abroad, and systematic surveillance, some Ameri­cans have often casually alleged that the Constitu­tion has been sacrificed to unnecessary security concerns. But it is far more difficult to calibrate this supposed loss of civil liberties than it is to appreciate the absence of a post-9/11 terrorist attack. That said, is there a danger that, in fact, we have lost much of the ability of self-expression- not through government zealousness, but a cer­tain laxity on its part to protect free speech-as a result of Western public opinion that itself is will­ing to sacrifice unfettered expression, either out of good intentions or sheer fear?

The Nature of Freedom

In this regard, we can ask a few rhetorical ques­tions about the nature of freedom and security in the public realm. Take a variety of contemporary genres of Western expression.

Film: Is it now safer for a moviemaker to pro­duce a controversial feature-length film attacking the President of the United States (as in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 or Gabriel Range's Death of a President ,which offered a dramatic version of an assassination of George Bush) or a short clip ques­tioning radical Islam, such as Gert Wilders' Fitna or Theo Van Gogh's Submission ?

Novels: Is a Western writer more in danger for writing a novel contemplating the assassination of a sitting American President (such as Nicholson Bak­er's 2004 Alfred Knopf-published Checkpoint ) or one, in allegorical fashion, caricaturing Islam (such as Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses )?

Journalism: Is a Westerner more constrained from caricaturing a sitting American President in print (such as Jonathan Chait's 2004 New Republic article, "The Case for Bush Hatred," with its first sentence, "I hate President George W. Bush") or drawing editorial cartoons mocking Islam (such as those initially published in 2005 in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten )?

Religious Expression: Is a Western religious figure more in danger issuing a CD damning the United States (such as Rev. Jeremiah Wright call­ing the United States "The USKKK of A," urging his congregation to "Goddamn America," and sug­gesting that the United States deserved the 9/11 attacks) or referencing the historic relations between Islam and Christianity (such as Pope Benedict's quotation of a 14th century Byzantine treatise about a letter from a Manuel II Paleologus to leaders of the Ottoman Empire)?

Public Dissent and Expression: Would a citizen of London or Amsterdam feel more secure in violent public protest of Israeli foreign policy or in peace­fully criticizing Islamic Sharia law and its contribu­tions to terror abroad and repression at home?

Government Bureaucracies: Is it more likely for an American or European government agency to prohibit the use of particular descriptive phrases, such as "Islamic terrorism" or "Jihad," or insensitively to demonize all Muslims in its pub­lic proclamations?

Each age has its demons of either laxity or authoritarianism. But our age has fostered a nov­el menace in a peculiar form of self-censorship that far exceeds anything dreamed up by the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, or the Pentagon. The only mystery about our reluc­tance to speak honestly and freely about particu­lar issues is our eagerness to give up on free expression, especially when it comes to radical Islam that fuels much of the world's terrorism in the present post-9/11 landscape.

Other than fear, one cause surely is contempo­rary postmodern ideologies, such as multicultural­ism, utopian pacifism, and moral equivalence. What these notions have in common are particular views of radical egalitarianism and Western culpa­bility for the inability to achieve it.

Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism-whether found in Edward Saïd's Orientalism or "black liberation theory" or var­ious indictments of European colonialism of Africa and the Americas-grew up in an age of postwar affluence, characterized by Western guilt over past colonialism, imperialism, and global dominance. It argues that the sins of humankind-slavery, sexism, racism, and imperialism-were uniquely Western rather than simply innate to all cultures. Therefore, we could hardly use our own arbitrary standards of "freedom" or "equality" to judge other cultures, a practice that in the past had led to the subjugation and oppression of others under dishonest banners such as "civilization."

In its most radical manifestation, multicultural­ism would argue that Westerners could not arbitrari­ly define what distinguishes the methodology of a contemporary Islamic terrorist from, say, the revolu­tionary generation of 1776 or a B-17 bombardier over Dresden or an American G.I. at Hue. Or, more broadly, the multiculturalist alleges that the West has neither the moral capital nor the intellectual deftness to condemn foreign practices such as suicide bomb­ing, religious intolerance, female circumcision, and honor killings, and so must allow that these endemic practices and customs are merely "different" rather than repugnant across time and space.

The practical consequence is that millions within the West have been taught not believe in Western exceptionalism and thus insidiously convey that message to millions of immigrants who seek to enjoy the benefits of European and American life, but feel no need to assimilate into it, and, in some cases, thrive on being as antithetical to it as possible-albe­it without forfeiting the undeniable material benefits that residency within Western borders conveys.

Many Westerners are now hesitant to condemn something like Sharia law in abstract terms as an enemy of freedom, or to say Islamist suicide bomb­ers kill barbarously for a uniquely evil cause. Because of multiculturalism, many in the West either don't think jihadists pose any more threat than does their own industrial capitalist state, or, if they do, they feel that they simply lack the knowl­edge, or have previously lost the moral capital, to do anything about it.

Utopian Pacifism

Utopian pacifism was always innate in Western civilization, given its propensity both to wage horrific wars and, in response, to seek trans-national legisla­tive means to prevent the reoccurrence of such catas­trophes. From classical times, there has been a strain in Western letters and thought that a natural human, freed of the burdens of an oppressive civilization, might find a blissful existence without war, hunger, or the stress of the nation-state-should he be properly educated and replace emotion with reason.

In revulsion to the carnage of the European 20th century, and given the respite at the end of an exis­tential threat from a nuclear Soviet Union, these old ideas about the perfectibility of human nature through education, and energized by a vast increase in national income, have again taken hold. Some­times we see these hopes manifested in world gov­ernment, such as those who advocate surrendering national sovereignty to the United Nations or the World Court at The Hague.

Sometimes they are more pedagogical and more ambitious, such as establishing "Peace Studies" programs to inculcate our youth that with proper study and counsels war can be outlawed, as if the resulting carnage is a result of misunderstanding rather than evil leaders knowing exactly what they want and planning how to get it. At other moments, diplomats delude themselves into think­ing leaders of autocratic states-a Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran or Bashar Assad of Syria or North Korea's Kim Jong-il-either have legitimate complaints against the West that explain their hos­tility or have been misrepresented in the Western press and appear bellicose largely through misun­derstanding and miscommunication. In fact, the utopian believes that such autocrats no more wish to harm us than we do them, and resort to armed threats largely as a legitimate reaction to the mili­tary preparedness of democracy.

Like multiculturalism, utopian pacifism has had the effect within Western societies of defining differ­ence down, and deluding Western publics into thinking that problems with radical Islam are as much of our own making as they a result of aggres­sive jihadist doctrines. In practical terms, utopia­nism, like multiculturalism, translates into a public that does its best to convey the message that Western and radical Islamic cultures are roughly similar- and that any differences that arise can be adjudicated through greater understanding and dialogue. There­fore, novelists, filmmakers, journalists, or politicians who believe otherwise should not express their sen­timents out of concern for the greater ecumenical good-or at least exercise prudence in curtailing free expression, in recognition that their naked expres­sion may evoke a counter-response quite injurious to the Western public in general.

Moral Equivalence

A third postmodern tenet that has curtailed free expression is what I would call moral equivalence, or the inability to discern Western and non-Western pathologies. As a strain of multiculturalism, moral equivalence seeks to do away with any notion of cal­ibration and magnitude and places impossible bur­dens of perfection upon Western societies.

Sometimes the Western misdemeanor is defined down as equivalent to another culture's felony. Abu Ghraib, for example, where no Iraqi detainees per­ished, is the equivalent of either a Nazi Stalag or Soviet Gulag, where millions were starved to death or executed. After all, all three were penal camps and therefore roughly equivalent in ethical terms.

Context becomes irrelevant. The invasion of Iraq-approved by an elected Senate, argued over at the United Nations, intended to remove a geno­cidal dictator and leave a constitutional govern­ment in its wake-is no different from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the result of a Communist dictatorship's desire to crush an anti-Soviet neigh­bor, waged ruthlessly against a civilian population, and resulting in the installation of an authoritarian puppet government.

Standards of censure are never equally applied: We worry whether an errant bomb killed Iraqi civil­ians; silence ensues when Russians nearly obliterate Grozny and kill tens of thousands of civilians. The mishandling of the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina, one of the five worst natural disasters in the nation's history, in which 1,836 Americans were killed, is singular evidence of Amer­ican racism and incompetence; nearly 300,000 were lost in an Indonesian tsunami, a Burmese hurricane accounted for 100,000 dead, and a Chinese earth­quake took 50,000 lives-and few remarked either on the incompetence of these governments in react­ing to such a staggering loss of life or the failure of such states to provide safe and adequate housing for their populations in the first place.

Despite the veneer of internationalism and car­ing, moral equivalence is predicated on the arrogant and condescending notion of low expectations- that an educated and affluent Western society must not err, while the "other" is apparently always expected to. Once the doctrine of moral equivalence is adopted, it becomes impossible to abide by any standards of censure. We circumcise infant males, so why should not the Sudanese "circumcise" female infants? We have bombed civilians, so why should not suicide bombers do the same? Timothy McVeigh was a religious, right-wing terrorist, so why are the thousands of Islamist terrorists deserv­ing of any special censure?

The aggregate result of multiculturalism, utopi­an pacifism, and moral equivalence is that philo­sophically and ethically the Western  public becomes ill-equipped to condemn Islamic extrem­ism. In Western consensual societies, this so-called "political correctness" likewise permeates the legis­lative, executive, and judicial branches of govern­ment. For a variety of reasons, we voluntarily restrict free speech and expression.  But in the cases in which we otherwise would not, we do not expect our governments to have the intellectual and moral wherewithal to protect the safety of writers, film­makers, intellectuals, and journalists who chose to express themselves candidly and incur the wrath of radicals abroad.

The Embarrassment of Riches

One question remains. Why have these particu­lar harmful doctrines become so popular in our own era? In the general sense, the wealthier, freer, and more leisured a society becomes-and none is more so on all three counts than is 21st-century America-the more its population has the leeway, the margin of error, so to speak, both to question and feel guilty over its singular privilege. Abstract doctrines that allow one to vent remorse over our riches, without denying our enjoyment of them, sat­isfy a psychological need to reconcile what are intrinsically irreconcilable.

Second, with the collapse of Communism and the rise of globalized capitalism, Marxism as a for­mal doctrine was formally discredited. But its underlying and more vague assumptions that the state must enforce an equality of result among all the citizenry remains attractive to many. One way of forcing Western societies to redistribute their wealth both at home and abroad is to argue that it was not earned or the results of practices not at all unique from, much less better than, those found in non-Western societies.

False Consciousness

The Marxist corollary of false consciousness, that the deluded masses must be enlightened by well-meaning elites to recognize their true interests explains why the utopian insists on the substitution of his version of reason (pacifism) over the mob's superstition and emotion ("war-mongering"). And to justify the use of state coercion to stifle the indi­vidual, the old Marxist doctrine equates its own brutality merely as remedy for original oppression and exploitation.

The Western military tradition assures Western states that they could, if they so wish , become almost immune from foreign attack. Consensual govern­ments can, in extremis , craft security legislation con­sistent with constitutional principles that will protect citizens without eroding their rights. But government has no remedy once citizens voluntari­ly begin to abandon freedom of expression out of fear, guilt-or misguided ideologies designed to deny the singularity of their civilization.

Questions and Answers

Question: You mentioned those three ideolo­gies. But we're conservatives-I am. Why aren't those voices as strong as they might be to counter the ideologies that you've outlined?

Victor Davis Hanson: Let me speak now as if I were on the Left. They would say something like the following: that you are influential in the sense that the muscles of the United States-the corporation, the workplace, the government, the religion-is all conservative. But we on the Left- I'm not a member of the Left, but I've heard this argument from members of my own family for years-only have certain avenues of expression. These happen to be intellectual, they happen to be journalistic, so we have the foundations, we have the university to try to counter this.

This is very prevalent in the university. The university has come up with this dogma since the 1960s, that it openly does not have to be bal­anced.  They say that we don't because we only have students for four years and then they're going to go out in the wider world and be subject to the coercion of the family, of the religion, of the government, so we have to sort of indoctrinate them and prepare them.

I think that's pretty much where we are, that we in the conservative community feel that a lot of our talent does not go into the same types of fields. We don't have people as interested in journalism, in foundations, in the university, because they tend to be drawn off more in government or in business.

You can see that in antiquity a great deal. In antiquity, if you were a person who was suspicious of radical egalitarianism in Athens, then you might be a Plato or you might be a Socrates or you might be a Xenophon, but you were not going into an Athenian hedge fund. There was not that avenue for business. Indeed, business was considered less than noble. But I think what's happened in our own life is that the law and business and the military especially-we have brilliant minds in the mili­tary-has taken a lot of the talent, and we haven't made the investment as a conservative community to fight that intellectual struggle.

Question: Dr. Hanson, in your discussion of security and liberty and the contrast between the two, you didn't say a great deal about where this struggle is playing itself out in recent years, namely, in the legislatures and in the courts. And this is coming-especially in the last 30 years-to be a very burning issue with the struggle by the lawyers and the law professors, in particular, in the name of liberty to impose a judicialization of warfare. This is something that concerns many of us, and I wonder if you would say a few words about that.

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, that's a very good question. That controversy was prominent in the 1990s, and there was a backlash against the World Court at The Hague, the appropriation of U.S. sovereignty, say in the U.N. I think that the problems in Iraq have now re-ignited that danger.

In other words, the utopian mind, the multicul­tural mind, the moral equivalent mind, suggests that given the nature of the United States or its his­tory, it needs to be watched, and it needs to be sub­ject to international law.

Where does this idea come from? It comes from a vision, I suppose, to paraphrase Tom Sowell in The Anointed : Once one adopts a cosmic view of the brotherhood of man or the egalitarianism of the individual that provides all sorts of advantages to the person who holds those views. They don't have to worry about intricacies; they don't have to worry about legal decisions; their motives are never checked or questioned. So then a judge in Califor­nia can suggest that gay marriage does not have to follow a plebiscite or a legislative act, due to his superior wisdom and morality and ethics and due to all the wonderful things that can accrue. If Plato were to look at that, he might say this is a classic authoritarian. The authoritarian on the Left is not subject to that baggage because his motives, as we all know, are unimpeachable.

That is, I think, the great danger that we're seeing with the trampling of civil liberties by the courts and the coercion put on the United States to make it subject to the World Court at The Hague or the United Nations-this idea that the people who are doing that are doing it for these wonderful motives.

We see the same thing with radical environmen­talism. Once you accept the idea of the messiah, that he wants the best for us with his greater wisdom, it's a very Enlightenment idea as well, that we don't want to be bound by this sub-civilized wrangling, these people who have captive or parochial notions of guns or property because we have a much better intent, a much better mission for all this.

I think that's always the danger of the utopian. That's why I'm very worried that, as I said, I think we're losing the enlightenment as we speak. None of us are sure what we can say or should say, and it's not being questioned because the people who are doing this have such unimpeachable motives. But I'm very worried about that, especially, as you men­tioned, in the courts. After all, we got enormous criticism from the Europeans about the trial of Sad­dam Hussein, which, however one feels, there was a constitutionality and a rapidity to it. But there was no rapidity and there was really no constitutionality to the trial of Milosevic, which went on and on, and was never resolved until he died in captivity. And yet in Europe, that's considered a model of jurispru­dence because their motives were so much better than ours-or so they profess.

Question: There's an increasingly widespread notion that there's a whole slew of words that we ought not to use. In various institutions and agen­cies, we should replace the word "jihad" with the word "extremism," and we shouldn't use words like "radical Islam." My question is, how does that fit in with what you're talking about, and can you com­ment on that at all?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Well, euphemism, as you know, is always employed for utopian purposes. Think what we've lost-and this is something I could've easily added to journalism and film had I been given more time. Think that we started this war by saying we were going to go to Afghanistan, and we were going to conduct, I think it was "infinite justice." And then some­body said, "Uh-oh, that's insensitive, because only Mohammed or Allah can have infinite, so we're going to change this to 'enduring free­dom.'" And once you devolve down that road- worrying about what the enemy thinks rather than demonstrating that you don't care, which is always wise to do in war; I don't think anybody in this country worried about using the word "Hun" in World War I, for example-we very quickly found out that we can't use the word "war on terror," or we can't use "Islamic fascist," or, as I understand now, the military has excised "the long war." We can't use, as you said, "jihad­ist," "Islamic fascist."

The problem with all these things is that war is  primordial. As George Patton said, you can't refine it, or, as William Tecumseh Sherman said-some­thing to that effect. It's a horrible, dirty business that should be gotten over as quickly as possible. But when you start to do that-refine it and make it something it's not-all you do is convey to the ene­my that you're sensitive to his needs. I see there is really an enemy; it's not just simply public opinion within the Arab world.

One of the things I think is a great tragedy in the war in Iraq is that if you were to collate everything that's come out just in the last six weeks, if you look at Lawrence Wright's New Yorker article or Peter Reuben writing in The New Republic, or you look at the CIA's estimate of the relative difficulties that al-Qaeda is experiencing, or if you look at the Pew poll about the radical decline in approval for Osama bin Laden, radical decline in approval for suicide bomb­ing, and if you came from Mars, you might suggest that that might have something to do with Iraq. When you have a battlefield, a third battlefield that's not within our grounds but in the heart of the ancient caliphate, and people were coming all dur­ing 2003 to 2004 to be victorious martyrs, and then word got out that if you went to Iraq, it's synony­mous with humiliation, death, and defeat, and that the United States before the world stage showed the Muslim world-indeed, the entire world-that it could: a) learn how to conduct counterinsurgency, and b) do it in a way that won the hearts and minds.

Well, inhabitants of that very region, shared kin­dred spirits of the same religion: a) could not win an insurgency; and, more important, b) lost the hearts and minds of its own communities it was trying to sway. And it seemed to me that that would have a very, very powerful effect on the phenomenon that all these writers were describing. Yet no one dared mention Iraq; it had no role to play at all in this rad­ical turnabout in Iraq.

And it's part of this effort in the West that you don't want. That's a very good example of the tenet of utopian pacifism-that you don't want to say there's any utility or efficacy out of military. I'm so tired of people saying there is no military solution in Iraq. In fact, there is. It's not a military solution in a conventional sense; it's something that General Dav­id Petraeus is doing by so changing the complexion of the battlefield that gives it critical space, critical time for the Maliki government to gain support, prestige, and to win the hearts and minds. But that can't be done if security is not given by the U.S. mil­itary through its own actions and training to allow Iraqis to enjoy freedom.

Question: My question to you is how you think the founding fathers would view the balance between security and liberty we have today after 9/ 11? Would they think that we've gone too far in the direction of security and away from liberty? For instance, Ben Franklin's quote about if you trade lib­erty for security you end up with neither.

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, I don't know what they would say about the Civil War; I think they would have been very worried about the pro­tocols that the Lincoln Administration adopted, and especially those by Andrew Johnson. I think they would have been shocked at some of the things that Woodrow Wilson did: arresting Eugene Debs and pretty much putting him incommunicado , or statutes against the teaching of German. I think they would have been shocked, perhaps, by what we did in World War II, especially with the internment and especially with the military tribunals.

But I'm not sure that there is anything that we've done since 9/11 that they would be at all surprised about. I keep hearing that the Constitution is shred­ded, but one is pressed to find absolute proof of that, or even meager proof of that. It's very hard for the individual.

Now, you can make the argument, "Well, I'm being tapped, and I don't know it, and at some future date that will be used against me," but so far, if we talk about the traditional freedoms-the free­dom to worship, the freedom to express ourselves openly, the freedom to do almost anything-I think you can see there's almost no worry. Remember what the Wilson Administration did in World War I, when they passed a statute that said it was a felony for anybody to criticize a government official in a time of war that could have a bad effect on the effort. I can't think today, so far have we come, that if you were to say to Woodrow Wilson, "We're going to fight a war essentially a century after you're gone, and in the middle of that war authors are going to write novels about killing the President, filmmakers are going to make movies about killing the Presi­dent, and nobody cares," I think he might say, "Well, this is very dangerous."

I'm not suggesting when I cited those examples that we need more coercion or that we need to chas­tise Gabriel Range, the filmmaker-I think it's won­derful that they have that freedom of expression. But I think to suggest at the same time that they're voices of the oppressed or the coerced is absolutely lunacy. Not at all! I can't think of a society in history where major intellectuals and journalists even in a caricatured way advocated hating or killing a Presi­dent with absolutely no social disdain. It wasn't even there wasn't a statute-which there shouldn't have been-but there was not a lot of criticism of them. Alfred Knopf is probably the most prestigious publisher in New York, and they felt perfectly fine with publishing Checkpoint .

Question: I was just wondering if you thought there was a solution to overcoming these ideologies, and if so, how do we do so without engaging in some sort of counter-censorship with, as you said, academia or others?

Victor Davis Hanson: I think the answer is history, history, history. These are the symptoms of a historically ignorant society that has almost no knowledge. You can see it with Iraq when people say, "This is the worst fill-in-the-blank-fiasco, blunder-in our entire history."

I just got back from leading a group to battlefields in Europe. How could the United States have planned the Normandy invasion and lost almost 730 people in training exercises up near Scotland by a German boat and nobody knew about it? How could you marshal yourself in such a way that you had a brilliant, successful invasion where you knew the grains of sand, the direction of the water current, the air temperature, and then nobody ask a simple ques­tion, "How do you get through the bocage?" Then for the next seven weeks you lost 80,000 American dead, wounded, and you went only four miles-in probably the biggest blunder of that war.

How could you try to break out during the Cobra Offensive and use B-17s and bomb your own peo­ple because they flew perpendicular rather than parallel? And then in a burst of acrimony say you're going to do it again, and then do it again and bomb three days later and kill more Americans, including three-star General McNair-and then have a pri­vate, censored funeral where nobody would know about it? This is what this country had to do. It's made blunders that made the lack of armored Hum­vees seem ridiculous.

But I think the answer is that we, for all our talk about the mortgage crisis and fuel prices, by any definition are the most privileged generation in the history of not just America, but Western society.

Out of that, if history is any guide, there becomes a certain mentality that we're like the proverbial picker in a plum orchard that always goes for the plum out of reach that's shiny, and then lets rot the one right before it. This overreach, this utopian notion that we can have no bad choices, that the war is not between bad and worse, but simply between always better or perfection-and so then we tear and demonize and destroy our leaders who make mis­takes that by any historical barometer pale in com­parison to something in the past-I could sum it all up by historical ignorance. History is the most important of all disciplines, and yet look at one of our presidential candidates, when he was asked about education, what did Mr. Obama say? We need more oppression studies, more stories-and then he named about six particular victim groups. That's exactly what we don't need. We need more history.

Question: Do you think in the selling or the preparation of the war on terror to move into Iraq, the Bush Administration emphasized enough the fact that Saddam Hussein was paying and support­ing the surviving families of suicide bombing terror­ists? I heard from Muslims that that was a tremendous debate among all types of Muslims, whether that type of support was appropriate. But don't you think that from the United States' view­point, they should have strongly emphasized that and even perhaps made that the major emphasis for the motivation to go to war?

Victor Davis Hanson: Not only do I agree with you, but I wrote something in the National Review Corner today, and I made that argument ad nauseam , because not long ago I made that argu­ment and somebody wrote me two letters ad nause­am , meaning "Okay, we heard it already." But the point is that, of all the supposed "lapses" of the Bush Administration, every one of them in some sense was a judgment call. When you get into Iraq, should you have more troops or less troops? Remember that people said that we should've had more people who had written books about the first Gulf War say­ing the Pentagon always exaggerates a threat and we put too many in.

These were all judgment calls. Disband the Republican Army, you might get chaos. Keep it, and you might get Ba'athists in a trench. But there was one lapse, and I think it's what you're alluding to, that was absolutely, clearly a mistake. And that was in the run up to the war. Contrary to popular jour­nalistic option, we didn't rush to war. We had nine months of discussion. We went to the United Nations. But most importantly, on October 11 and 12, 2002, the Congress-especially the Senate, but also the House of Representatives-gave the Presi­dent a gift, so to speak, and gave us, the American people, a gift: They voted for 23 writs of authoriza­tions, I should say, to go to war. One of them, as you said, was subsidies of $20,000 for suicide bombers that were attacking the Israelis, but another one was the carnage inflicted against the Kurds. There was mention of the Shia; there was the Oil-for-Food scandal.

One of the great speeches, remember, was Harry Reid's, when he said, "This is academic. They broke the 1991 accords. We're in a de facto state of war." There was the difficulty of the no-fly zones, there was the attempt to kill George Bush. They haven't changed. WMD (weapons of mass destruction) may have changed, and it may have been a mistake, but the other 20-something haven't changed. If the Administration had just said, "We're going to go to war because the Senate, in their infinite wisdom, has outlined a case for it that's overwhelming, that's predicated on 23 principles," then when one princi­ple had misled them, they wouldn't have been in the jam that they're in. They would have had legitimacy.

Remember what people are like. We're a pretty reprehensible species. We have no strong views. Twenty percent wanted to go to war, 20 percent did not want to go to war. Twenty percent wanted in 1861 to go to war. The great majority of people pred­icate their political views on the pulse of the battle­field. That's why if I wanted to embarrass pundits this day, I could take 10 pundits at random and sug­gest that for all their anti-war opposition, they wrote strong editorials at some point in 2001 to 2003 about going into Iraq. I suggest that if the thing calms down, if there's a constitutional government, if Nouri al-Maliki gives a great thank-you speech to the Senate, they will come around and say they were always for the war. That's what people do.

The problem is that when the Administration predicated all the eggs in one basket on WMD, and that did not turn up, that was a get-out-of-jail card, so to speak. It was a way for people, when the insur­gency started, to abandon the cause. They can say, "Bush lied; thousands died." They could not have said Bush lied, thousands died if he had said, "Wait a minute. We're here because this man tried to kill a former President; this man has destroyed the Shias; this man tried to practice Holocaust; this man broke the 1991 accords; this man destroyed the ecology of Marsh Arabs; this man was giving bounties to sui­cide bombers; this man had $50 billion Oil-for-Food." I think that really hurt the cause in Iraq.

The odd thing about it is that with the brilliance of General Petraeus and what we've accomplished so far, you're starting to see these other issues of why we went to war be addressed. We're starting to address the Marsh Arabs. We are addressing the freedom and security of the Kurds by the very fact that a constitutional system seems to be legitimate and seems to be working.

The greatest irony of all is that the original 23 rea­sons that we went to war will be solved by the suc­cess of the Maliki government, but yet it's fallen on deaf ears. WMD became the narrative-you win or lose by that narrative. Unfortunately, it had terrible effects on public opinion, and especially on the poor soldiers who were over there when this radical change of opinion took place and they were orphaned.

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• How to Write a Thesis Statement | 4 Steps & Examples

How to Write a Thesis Statement | 4 Steps & Examples

Published on January 11, 2019 by Shona McCombes . Revised on August 15, 2023 by Eoghan Ryan.

A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . It usually comes near the end of your introduction .

Your thesis will look a bit different depending on the type of essay you’re writing. But the thesis statement should always clearly state the main idea you want to get across. Everything else in your essay should relate back to this idea.

You can write your thesis statement by following four simple steps:

• Start with a question
• Write your initial answer
• Develop your answer
• Refine your thesis statement

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Table of contents

What is a thesis statement, placement of the thesis statement, step 1: start with a question, step 2: write your initial answer, step 3: develop your answer, step 4: refine your thesis statement, types of thesis statements, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about thesis statements.

A thesis statement summarizes the central points of your essay. It is a signpost telling the reader what the essay will argue and why.

The best thesis statements are:

• Concise: A good thesis statement is short and sweet—don’t use more words than necessary. State your point clearly and directly in one or two sentences.
• Contentious: Your thesis shouldn’t be a simple statement of fact that everyone already knows. A good thesis statement is a claim that requires further evidence or analysis to back it up.
• Coherent: Everything mentioned in your thesis statement must be supported and explained in the rest of your paper.

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The thesis statement generally appears at the end of your essay introduction or research paper introduction .

The spread of the internet has had a world-changing effect, not least on the world of education. The use of the internet in academic contexts and among young people more generally is hotly debated. For many who did not grow up with this technology, its effects seem alarming and potentially harmful. This concern, while understandable, is misguided. The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its many benefits for education: the internet facilitates easier access to information, exposure to different perspectives, and a flexible learning environment for both students and teachers.

You should come up with an initial thesis, sometimes called a working thesis , early in the writing process . As soon as you’ve decided on your essay topic , you need to work out what you want to say about it—a clear thesis will give your essay direction and structure.

You might already have a question in your assignment, but if not, try to come up with your own. What would you like to find out or decide about your topic?

For example, you might ask:

After some initial research, you can formulate a tentative answer to this question. At this stage it can be simple, and it should guide the research process and writing process .

Now you need to consider why this is your answer and how you will convince your reader to agree with you. As you read more about your topic and begin writing, your answer should get more detailed.

In your essay about the internet and education, the thesis states your position and sketches out the key arguments you’ll use to support it.

The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its many benefits for education because it facilitates easier access to information.

In your essay about braille, the thesis statement summarizes the key historical development that you’ll explain.

The invention of braille in the 19th century transformed the lives of blind people, allowing them to participate more actively in public life.

A strong thesis statement should tell the reader:

• Why you hold this position
• What they’ll learn from your essay
• The key points of your argument or narrative

The final thesis statement doesn’t just state your position, but summarizes your overall argument or the entire topic you’re going to explain. To strengthen a weak thesis statement, it can help to consider the broader context of your topic.

These examples are more specific and show that you’ll explore your topic in depth.

Your thesis statement should match the goals of your essay, which vary depending on the type of essay you’re writing:

• In an argumentative essay , your thesis statement should take a strong position. Your aim in the essay is to convince your reader of this thesis based on evidence and logical reasoning.
• In an expository essay , you’ll aim to explain the facts of a topic or process. Your thesis statement doesn’t have to include a strong opinion in this case, but it should clearly state the central point you want to make, and mention the key elements you’ll explain.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
• Sunk cost fallacy

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A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . Everything else you write should relate to this key idea.

The thesis statement is essential in any academic essay or research paper for two main reasons:

• It gives your writing direction and focus.
• It gives the reader a concise summary of your main point.

Without a clear thesis statement, an essay can end up rambling and unfocused, leaving your reader unsure of exactly what you want to say.

Follow these four steps to come up with a thesis statement :

• Ask a question about your topic .
• Write your initial answer.
• Develop your answer by including reasons.
• Refine your answer, adding more detail and nuance.

The thesis statement should be placed at the end of your essay introduction .

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